Explanations for CommonsenseQA: New Dataset and Models

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


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.238
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3050–3065
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.238
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.238
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shourya Aggarwal, Divyanshu Mandowara, Vishwajeet Agrawal, Dinesh Khandelwal, Parag Singla, and Dinesh Garg. 2021. Explanations for CommonsenseQA: New Dataset and Models. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3050–3065, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Explanations for CommonsenseQA: New Dataset and Models (Aggarwal et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2021.acl-long.238.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2021.acl-long.238.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
Video:
 https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2021.acl-long.238.mp4
Data
ECQACoS-ECommonsenseQAMathQAOpenBookQAQASCWorldtree