CoachLah: A Singlish–English Parallel Corpus of Health Coaching Conversations with Behavior Goal Annotations

Abstract

Health coaching (HC) aims to promote sustainable behavior change through goal-oriented dialogue, but research in this area is limited by the scarcity of authentic, transcript-based corpora. Existing datasets are small, English-only, and Western-centric, overlooking cultural and linguistic factors that shape real-world HC interactions. We introduce CoachLah, the first Singlish–English parallel corpus of HC conversations collected from a randomized controlled trial in Singapore. The dataset comprises 36,852 utterances transcribed from almost 160 hours of recorded HC sessions with 51 clients and 4 professional health coaches. Each dialogue is speaker-labeled, transcribed in Singlish, and aligned with high-quality English translations to preserve linguistic and cultural nuances. All sessions include HC summaries written by health coaches after each HC session, from which behavioral goals were manually annotated. To demonstrate the dataset’s utility, we benchmark two downstream tasks: (i) Singlish-to-English translation using fine-tuned open-weight models (e.g., Gemma-2-9B-it) with Low-Rank Adaptation, and (ii) behavioral goal extraction from unstructured HC summaries using span-based modeling (e.g., DeBERTa-v3-base). Together, these contributions establish the first culturally grounded benchmark for low-resource, goal-oriented dialogue research in HC. Both the code and the dataset are available at: https://github.com/IvaBojic/CoachLah.

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