  Rationality and emotion are two fundamental elements of humans. Endowing
agents with rationality and emotion has been one of the major milestones in AI.
However, in the field of conversational AI, most existing models only
specialize in one aspect and neglect the other, which often leads to dull or
unrelated responses. In this paper, we hypothesize that combining rationality
and emotion into conversational agents can improve response quality. To test
the hypothesis, we focus on one fundamental aspect of rationality, i.e.,
commonsense, and propose CARE, a novel model for commonsense-aware emotional
response generation. Specifically, we first propose a framework to learn and
construct commonsense-aware emotional latent concepts of the response given an
input message and a desired emotion. We then propose three methods to
collaboratively incorporate the latent concepts into response generation.
Experimental results on two large-scale datasets support our hypothesis and
show that our model can produce more accurate and commonsense-aware emotional
responses and achieve better human ratings than state-of-the-art models that
only specialize in one aspect.
