@inproceedings{kirstein-etal-2025-need, title = "You need to {MIMIC} to get {FAME}: Solving Meeting Transcript Scarcity with Multi-Agent Conversations", author = "Kirstein, Frederic and Khan, Muneeb and Wahle, Jan Philip and Ruas, Terry and Gipp, Bela", editor = "Che, Wanxiang and Nabende, Joyce and Shutova, Ekaterina and Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher", booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025", month = jul, year = "2025", address = "Vienna, Austria", publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics", url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.599/", doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.599", pages = "11482--11525", ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5", abstract = "Meeting summarization suffers from limited high-quality data, mainly due to privacy restrictions and expensive collection processes. We address this gap with FAME, a dataset of 500 meetings in English and 300 in German produced by MIMIC, our new multi-agent meeting synthesis framework that generates meeting transcripts on a given knowledge source by defining psychologically grounded participant profiles, outlining the conversation, and orchestrating a large language model (LLM) debate. A modular post-processing step refines these outputs, mitigating potential repetitiveness and overly formal tones, ensuring coherent, credible dialogues at scale. We also propose a psychologically grounded evaluation framework assessing naturalness, social behavior authenticity, and transcript difficulties. Human assessments show that FAME approximates real-meeting spontaneity (4.5/5 in naturalness), preserves speaker-centric challenges (3/5 in spoken language), and introduces richer information-oriented difficulty (4/5 points in difficulty). These findings show FAME is a good and scalable proxy for real-world meeting conditions. It enables new test scenarios for meeting summarization research and other conversation-centric applications in tasks requiring conversation data or simulating social scenarios under behavioral constraints." }