Annotating Conversational Phases and Communication Techniques: A Corpus of German Teacher-Parent Counseling Conversations

Abstract

Teacher-parent conversations are critical for student success, yet teachers often lack structured training in counseling communication skills. We present the first annotated corpus of teacher-parent counseling conversations consisting of 59 German dialogues (approximately 6k sentences, 21k annotations) simulated by prospective elementary school teachers, peers, and professional actors. The corpus features theory-grounded annotations for conversational phases (Beginning, Informational, Argumentative, Decision-Making, Concluding) and communication techniques (Paraphrasing, Verbalizing, Structuring). We provide detailed annotation guidelines operationalizing established counseling pedagogy frameworks for computational analysis. Inter-annotator agreement analysis reveals substantial agreement (Fleiss’ k = 0.669 to 0.724, Krippendorff’s a = 0.666 to 0.735). Our analysis reveals confusion patterns, providing insights into counseling discourse structure. Baseline experiments with BERT-based models and open-source LLMs achieve F1 scores of up to 71% depending on task and model. The corpus, guidelines, and baseline code are publicly available under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, enabling research on automated dialogue analysis and AI-based training tools for teacher education.

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