Papers › Explanations for CommonsenseQA: New Dataset and Models

Explanations for CommonsenseQA: New Dataset and Models

1 Aug 2021AKBC Workshop CSKB 2021 10archive 2025-07-28

Shourya Aggarwal, Divyanshu Mandowara, Vishwajeet Agrawal, Dinesh Khandelwal, Parag Singla, Dinesh Garg

CommonsenseQA (CQA) (Talmor et al., 2019) dataset was recently released to advance the research on common-sense question answering (QA) task. Whereas the prior work has mostly focused on proposing QA models for this dataset, our aim is to retrieve as well as generate explanation for a given (question, correct answer choice, incorrect answer choices) tuple from this dataset. Our explanation definition is based on certain desiderata, and translates an explanation into a set of positive and negative common-sense properties (aka facts) which not only explain the correct answer choice but also refute the incorrect ones. We human-annotate a first-of-its-kind dataset (called ECQA) of positive and negative properties, as well as free-flow explanations, for $11K$ QA pairs taken from the CQA dataset. We propose a latent representation based property retrieval model as well as a GPT-2 based property generation model with a novel two step fine-tuning procedure. We also propose a free-flow explanation generation model. Extensive experiments show that our retrieval model beats BM25 baseline by a relative gain of 100{\%} in F₁ score, property generation model achieves a respectable F₁ score of 36.4, and free-flow generation model achieves a similarity score of 61.9, where last two scores are based on a human correlated semantic similarity metric.

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Common Sense Reasoning Explanation Generation Question Answering Retrieval Semantic Similarity Semantic Textual Similarity

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ECQA

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Adam Attention Attention Dropout BPE Cosine Annealing Dense Connections Discriminative Fine-Tuning Dropout GPT-2 Layer Normalization Linear Layer Linear Warmup With Cosine Annealing Multi-Head Attention Residual Connection Softmax Weight Decay

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