UEC-InabaLab/KokoroChat

<div align="center"> <img src="./kokorochatlogo.png" alt="KokoroChat Logo" width="500"/> </div>

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KokoroChat: A Japanese Psychological Counseling Dialogue Dataset Collected via Role-Playing by Trained Counselors

KokoroChat is the largest human-collected Japanese psychological counseling dialogue dataset to date (as of June 2025). It was created through role-playing between trained counselors and includes rich, long-form dialogues and detailed client feedback on counseling quality. The dataset supports research on empathetic response generation, dialogue evaluation, and mental health-oriented language modeling.

This work has been accepted to the main conference of ACL 2025. 📄 View Paper

🌟 Key Features

• —6,589 dialogues, collected between 2020 and 2024
• —Avg. 91.2 utterances per dialogue
• —480 trained counselors simulating online text-based counseling sessions
• —20-dimension Likert-scale client feedback for every session
• —Broad topic coverage: mental health, school, family, workplace, romantic issues, etc.

📊 Dataset Statistics

📁 Dataset Structure

Each sample contains:

• —A full counseling dialogue with role labels (counselor / client) and message timestamps
• —Structured client feedback on 20 dimensions (0–5 Likert scale)
• —Flags for ethical concern checks (optional)
• —Predicted topic label (automatically annotated by GPT-4o-mini)

👉 See the kokorochat_dialogues folder for the complete dataset.

🤖 Models Trained on KokoroChat

The following models were fine-tuned on subsets of the KokoroChat dataset with different feedback score ranges:

• —**Llama-3.1-KokoroChat-Low**: Fine-tuned on 3,870 dialogues with client feedback scores < 70

• —**Llama-3.1-KokoroChat-High**: Fine-tuned on 2,601 dialogues with scores between 70 and 98

• —**Llama-3.1-KokoroChat-Full**: Fine-tuned on 6,471 dialogues (excluding 118 test samples with score ≥ 99), with scores ≤ 98

• —🤖 Score Prediction Model:
• —Llama-3.1-KokoroChat-ScorePrediction: fine-tuned to predict client feedback scores based on the full counseling dialogue history.

📄 Citation

If you use this dataset, please cite the following paper:

@inproceedings{qi2025kokorochat,
  title     = {KokoroChat: A Japanese Psychological Counseling Dialogue Dataset Collected via Role-Playing by Trained Counselors},
  author    = {Zhiyang Qi and Takumasa Kaneko and Keiko Takamizo and Mariko Ukiyo and Michimasa Inaba},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year      = {2025},
  url       = {https://github.com/UEC-InabaLab/KokoroChat}
}

⚖️ License

KokoroChat is released under the **Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)** license.

[![CC BY-NC-ND 4.0][cc-by-nc-nd-image]][cc-by-nc-nd]

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