MIMIC: Multi-party Dialogue Augmentation via Speaker Stylistic Transfer

Gaetano Cimino, Giuseppe Carenini, Vincenzo Deufemia


Abstract
Annotated data scarcity has long hindered progress in dialogue discourse parsing. To fill this gap, we introduce MIMIC, a framework for augmenting discourse-annotated corpora via speaker stylistic transfer using Large Language Models (LLMs). MIMIC rephrases utterances while preserving discourse coherence, using the MASK metric to identify speakers for replacement that enrich structural diversity and the MIRROR method to select substitute speakers who have experienced similar discourse interactions. Experimental results on STAC and Molweni corpora show that parsers trained with MIMIC-augmented data improve both link prediction and relation classification, with consistent gains for underrepresented discourse patterns and in low-resource scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-eacl.141
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2693–2719
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.findings-eacl.141/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gaetano Cimino, Giuseppe Carenini, and Vincenzo Deufemia. 2026. MIMIC: Multi-party Dialogue Augmentation via Speaker Stylistic Transfer. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026, pages 2693–2719, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MIMIC: Multi-party Dialogue Augmentation via Speaker Stylistic Transfer (Cimino et al., Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.findings-eacl.141.pdf
Checklist:
 2026.findings-eacl.141.checklist.pdf