# ConvoSense: Overcoming Monotonous Commonsense Inferences for Conversational AI

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.15471 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15471/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [Diverse Beam Search: Decoding Diverse Solutions from Neural Sequence Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02424/) (2016)
- [Symbolic Knowledge Distillation: from General Language Models to Commonsense Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07178/) (2021)
- [COMET-ATOMIC 2020: On Symbolic and Neural Commonsense Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05953/) (2020)
- [SODA: Million-scale Dialogue Distillation with Social Commonsense Contextualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10465/) (2022)
- [A Knowledge-Enhanced Pretraining Model for Commonsense Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05139/) (2020)
- [CEM: Commonsense-aware Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05739/) (2021)
- [Comparison of Diverse Decoding Methods from Conditional Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06362/) (2019)
- [Knowledge Bridging for Empathetic Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09708/) (2020)
- [CICERO: A Dataset for Contextualized Commonsense Inference in Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13926/) (2022)
- [Think Before You Speak: Explicitly Generating Implicit Commonsense Knowledge for Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08501/) (2021)
- [Paragraph-level Commonsense Transformers with Recurrent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.01486/) (2020)
- [Reflect, Not Reflex: Inference-Based Common Ground Improves Dialogue Response Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09267/) (2022)
- [SocialDial: A Benchmark for Socially-Aware Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12026/) (2023)
- [CIDER: Commonsense Inference for Dialogue Explanation and Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00510/) (2021)
- [Mind the Gap! Injecting Commonsense Knowledge for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00930/) (2022)
- [Probing Commonsense Explanation in Dialogue Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09574/) (2021)
- [Multiview Contextual Commonsense Inference: A New Dataset and Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02890/) (2022)
- [ComFact: A Benchmark for Linking Contextual Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12678/) (2022)
- [Don't Forget Your ABC's: Evaluating the State-of-the-Art in Chat-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09180/) (2022)
- [MultiTalk: A Highly-Branching Dialog Testbed for Diverse Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01263/) (2021)
- [Improving Bot Response Contradiction Detection via Utterance Rewriting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11862/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [LayAlign: Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning in Large Language Models via Layer-Wise Adaptive Fusion and Alignment Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11405/) (2025)
- [TD-EVAL: Revisiting Task-Oriented Dialogue Evaluation by Combining Turn-Level Precision with Dialogue-Level Comparisons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19982/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Explicit Reasoning for Inference Integration in Commonsense-Augmented Dialogue Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09138/) (2024)
- [DyMT-ESB: Dynamic Multi-Turn Evaluation of Social Bias in User-LLM Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18649/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mastering commonsense understanding and reasoning is a pivotal skill essential for conducting engaging conversations. While there have been several attempts to create datasets that facilitate commonsense inferences in dialogue contexts, existing datasets tend to lack in-depth details, restate information already present in the conversation, and often fail to capture the multifaceted nature of commonsense reasoning. In response to these limitations, we compile a new synthetic dataset for commonsense reasoning in dialogue contexts using GPT, ConvoSense, that boasts greater contextual novelty, offers a higher volume of inferences per example, and substantially enriches the detail conveyed by the inferences. Our dataset contains over 500,000 inferences across 12,000 dialogues with 10 popular inference types, which empowers the training of generative commonsense models for dialogue that are superior in producing plausible inferences with high novelty when compared to models trained on the previous datasets. To the best of our knowledge, ConvoSense is the first of its kind to provide such a multitude of novel inferences at such a large scale.
