ACCENT: An Automatic Event Commonsense Evaluation Metric for Open-Domain Dialogue Systems

Commonsense reasoning is omnipresent in human communications and thus is an important feature for open-domain dialogue systems. However, evaluating commonsense in dialogue systems is still an open challenge. We take the first step by focusing on event commonsense that considers events and their relations, and is crucial in both dialogues and general commonsense reasoning. We propose AC-CENT, an event commonsense evaluation metric empowered by commonsense knowledge bases (CSKBs). ACCENT first extracts eventrelation tuples from a dialogue, and then evaluates the response by scoring the tuples in terms of their compatibility with the CSKB. To evaluate ACCENT, we construct the first public event commonsense evaluation dataset for open-domain dialogues. Our experiments show that ACCENT is an efficient metric for event commonsense evaluation, which achieves higher correlations with human judgments than existing baselines. * Equal contribution † The work was done while the author was conducting a summer internship at UCLA. ‡ The collaboration started when the author was a graduate student at USC.