LURE: a Phase-Labelled Synthetic Corpus of Online-Grooming Exchanges

Abstract

Phase-annotated conversational data is essential for studying the progression of online grooming of minors and for developing early warning tools. However, the only publicly available source (i.e., Perverted-Justice archive, which contains a subset coded using ChatCoder) is small, outdated, and frozen. We present a synthetic corpus of groomer-victim exchanges, generated using a retrieval-augmented pipeline running on institutional hardware. This pipeline uses an openly available, eight-billion-parameter, refusal-ablated language model. The corpus was created using the five stages of the responsible-generation protocol for synthetic datasets: ontology-driven design based on the ChatCoder luring-communication scheme (eight communicative tags mapped onto four grooming phases); multi-model prompt testing; human-in-the-loop supervision; semantic and feature-level validation; and modality-aware documentation. The released corpus contains 2,121 unique exchanges across seven tags and four phases, each accompanied by a Plutchik emotion field. Validation quantifies the integrity and lexical profile of the corpus, as well as the reproduction of real seed lines, in-domain label recoverability (tag accuracy: 0.85; phase accuracy: 0.93) and its transfer to real ChatCoder offender lines, which were coded automatically at the eight-tag level (31,640 lines) and by human coders at the three-construct level (10,876 posts). Accuracy was measured for lexical and sentence-embedding features, while a real-versus-synthetic discriminator was able to separate the two domains with 91% accuracy. The scope of the corpus includes controlled, phase-conditioned experimentation, pipeline development and augmentation alongside real data and awareness material. The corpus, its datasheet and the audit code are released with vetted access.