GEMCo: A Validated, Ethically Releasable Proxy for Inaccessible Counselling Data

This paper presents GEMCo, a releasable, human-written proxy for inaccessible counselling data: 86 complete German e-mail counselling conversations (728 messages), expert-authored cases and counsellor sessions with trained role-players. It is validated against a held-out reference of 124 real counselling conversations. The proxy and the real conversations are measured against each other in counsellor strategies and client emotions. The gap is detectable but small. A generative validation supports the analysis. The validation method itself generalises to any domain where real data cannot be shared but a human-made proxy can. Privacy and ethics keep real counselling data closed. GEMCo carries none by design and can be released -- a first step toward language research in this domain.

LLARS: Enabling Domain Expert & Developer Collaboration for LLM Prompting, Generation and Evaluation

We demonstrate LLARS (LLM Assisted Research System), an open-source platform that bridges the gap between domain experts and developers for building LLM-based systems. It integrates three tightly connected modules into an end-to-end pipeline: Collaborative Prompt Engineering for real-time co-authoring with version control and instant LLM testing, Batch Generation for configurable output production across user-selected prompts $\times$ models $\times$ data with cost control, and Hybrid Evaluation where human and LLM evaluators jointly assess outputs through diverse assessment methods, with live agreement metrics and provenance analysis to identify the best model-prompt combination for a given use case. New prompts and models are automatically available for batch generation and completed batches can be turned into evaluation scenarios with a single click. Interviews with six domain experts and three developers in online counselling confirmed that LLARS feels intuitive, saves considerable time by keeping everything in one place and makes interdisciplinary collaboration seamless.