@inproceedings{zaninello-magnini-2023-smashed,
    title = "A smashed glass cannot be full: Generation of Commonsense Explanations through Prompt-based Few-shot Learning",
    author = "Zaninello, Andrea  and
      Magnini, Bernardo",
    editor = "Dalvi Mishra, Bhavana  and
      Durrett, Greg  and
      Jansen, Peter  and
      Neves Ribeiro, Danilo  and
      Wei, Jason",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Reasoning and Structured Explanations (NLRSE)",
    month = jun,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.nlrse-1.3",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.nlrse-1.3",
    pages = "18--29",
    abstract = "We assume that providing explanations is a process to elicit implicit knowledge in human communication, and propose a general methodology to generate commonsense explanations from pairs of semantically related sentences. We take advantage of both prompting applied to large, encoder-decoder pre-trained language models, and few-shot learning techniques, such as pattern-exploiting training. Experiments run on the e-SNLI dataset show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on the explanation generation task, with a substantial reduction of labelled data. The obtained results open new perspective on a number of tasks involving the elicitation of implicit knowledge.",
}

We assume that providing explanations is a process to elicit implicit knowledge in human communication, and propose a general methodology to generate commonsense explanations from pairs of semantically related sentences. We take advantage of both prompting applied to large, encoder-decoder pre-trained language models, and few-shot learning techniques, such as pattern-exploiting training. Experiments run on the e-SNLI dataset show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on the explanation generation task, with a substantial reduction of labelled data. The obtained results open new perspective on a number of tasks involving the elicitation of implicit knowledge.
Zaninello, Andrea Magnini, Bernardo
A smashed glass cannot be full: Generation of Commonsense Explanations through Prompt-based Few-shot Learning