Providing plausible responses to why questions is a challenging but critical goal for language based human-machine interaction. Explanations are challenging in that they require many different forms of abstract knowledge and reasoning. Previous work has either relied on human-curated structured knowledge bases or detailed domain representation to generate satisfactory explanations. They are also often limited to ranking pre-existing explanation choices. In our work, we contribute to the under-explored area of generating natural language explanations for general phenomena. We automatically collect large datasets of explanation-phenomenon pairs which allow us to train sequence-to-sequence models to generate natural language explanations. We compare different training strategies and evaluate their performance using both automatic scores and human ratings. We demonstrate that our strategy is sufficient to generate highly plausible explanations for general open-domain phenomena compared to other models trained on different datasets.

本文旨在探讨人机交互中提供合理的解释是何等富有挑战性的，以及如何在生成自然语言解释时克服知识的多种抽象形式及推理。我们通过自动化新颖的数据收集方式构建了一种序列到序列的自然语言生成模型，并证明该方式相比其他方式能够更好地解释开放域现象。

学习解释：通过改写回答为什么问题