Data Augmentation Supporting a Conversational Agent Designed for Smoking Cessation Support Groups

Online support groups for smoking cessation are economical and accessible, yet they often face challenges with low user engagement and stigma. The use of an automatic conversational agent would improve engagement by ensuring that all user comments receive a timely response.). We address the challenge of insufficient high-quality data by employing a two-level data augmentation strategy: synthetic data augmentation and real data augmentation. First, we fine-tuned an open source LLM to classify posts from our existing smoking cessation support groups and identify intents with low F1 (precision+recall) scores. Then, for these intents, we generate additional synthetic data using prompt engineering with the GPT model, with an average of 87\% of the generated synthetic posts deemed high quality by human annotators. Overall, the synthetic augmentation process resulted in 43\% of the original posts being selected for augmentation, followed by 140\% synthetic expansion of these posts. Additionally, we scraped more than 10,000 real posts from a related online support context, of which 73\% were validated as good quality by human annotators. Each synthetic or scraped post underwent rigorous validation involving human reviewers to ensure quality and relevance. The validated new data, combined with the original support group posts, formed an augmented dataset used to retrain the intent classifier. Performance evaluation of the retrained model demonstrated a 32\% improvement in F1, confirming the effectiveness of our data augmentation approach. Synthetic and real post augmentation led to similar performance improvements. This study provides a replicable framework for enhancing conversational agent performance in domains where data scarcity is a critical issue.