When humans read or listen, they make implicit commonsense inferences that frame their understanding of what happened and why. As a step toward AI systems that can build similar mental models, we introduce GLUCOSE, a large-scale dataset of implicit commonsense causal knowledge, encoded as causal mini-theories about the world, each grounded in a narrative context. To construct GLUCOSE, we drew on cognitive psychology to identify ten dimensions of causal explanation, focusing on events, states, motivations, and emotions. Each GLUCOSE entry includes a story-specific causal statement paired with an inference rule generalized from the statement. This paper details two concrete contributions. First, we present our platform for effectively crowdsourcing GLUCOSE data at scale, which uses semi-structured templates to elicit causal explanations. Using this platform, we collected a total of ~670K specific statements and general rules that capture implicit commonsense knowledge about everyday situations. Second, we show that existing knowledge resources and pretrained language models do not include or readily predict GLUCOSE’s rich inferential content. However, when state-of-the-art neural models are trained on this knowledge, they can start to make commonsense inferences on unseen stories that match humans’ mental models.

The Story Cloze Test (SCT) is a recent framework for evaluating story comprehension and script learning. There have been a variety of models tackling the SCT so far. Although the original goal behind the SCT was to require systems to perform deep language understanding and commonsense reasoning for successful narrative understanding, some recent models could perform significantly better than the initial baselines by leveraging human-authorship biases discovered in the SCT dataset. In order to shed some light on this issue, we have performed various data analysis and analyzed a variety of top performing models presented for this task. Given the statistics we have aggregated, we have designed a new crowdsourcing scheme that creates a new SCT dataset, which overcomes some of the biases. We benchmark a few models on the new dataset and show that the top-performing model on the original SCT dataset fails to keep up its performance. Our findings further signify the importance of benchmarking NLP systems on various evolving test sets.

The LSDSem’17 shared task is the Story Cloze Test, a new evaluation for story understanding and script learning. This test provides a system with a four-sentence story and two possible endings, and the system must choose the correct ending to the story. Successful narrative understanding (getting closer to human performance of 100%) requires systems to link various levels of semantics to commonsense knowledge. A total of eight systems participated in the shared task, with a variety of approaches including.

The popularity of image sharing on social media and the engagement it creates between users reflect the important role that visual context plays in everyday conversations. We present a novel task, Image Grounded Conversations (IGC), in which natural-sounding conversations are generated about a shared image. To benchmark progress, we introduce a new multiple reference dataset of crowd-sourced, event-centric conversations on images. IGC falls on the continuum between chit-chat and goal-directed conversation models, where visual grounding constrains the topic of conversation to event-driven utterances. Experiments with models trained on social media data show that the combination of visual and textual context enhances the quality of generated conversational turns. In human evaluation, the gap between human performance and that of both neural and retrieval architectures suggests that multi-modal IGC presents an interesting challenge for dialog research.