A smashed glass cannot be full: Generation of Commonsense Explanations through Prompt-based Few-shot Learning

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.