Predicting the key explanation concept is essential for generating commonsense explanations. This paper introduces a method to predict the concept from pre-trained language models for commonsense explanation generation. Our experiment found that adopting a language model as the concept extractor and fine-tuning it with 20% training data can improve the quality and accuracy of the generated explanations over multiple evaluation metrics. Compared with conventional methods that search concepts over knowledge graphs, our method does not require the preparation and training models to search through knowledge graphs. To better understand the results from pre-trained language models, we also designed a metric to evaluate the retrieved concepts. Through analysis and experiments, we show the correlation between this metric and the performance of the generators, and we also show the importance of attaching concepts for generating high-quality sentences.

In light of the prominence of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) across numerous downstream tasks, shedding light on what they learn is an important endeavor. Whereas previous work focuses on assessing in-domain knowledge, we evaluate the generalization ability in biased scenarios through component combinations where it could be easy for the PLMs to learn shortcuts from the training corpus. This would lead to poor performance on the testing corpus, which is combinationally reconstructed from the training components. The results show that PLMs are able to overcome such distribution shifts for specific tasks and with sufficient data. We further find that overfitting can lead the models to depend more on biases for prediction, thus hurting the combinational generalization ability of PLMs.