🚨 Can response generation models read between the lines? Our 🆕 #EMNLP2021 paper probes RG models to see if they can identify common sense reasons by annotating CS explanations in dialogues and evaluating RG models for CS reasoning capabilities. We formalize CS as a *latent variable* that helps explain the observed variable “response” in the RG process and instantiate CS using textual explanations of the response.