Clarifying Underspecified Discourse Relations in Instructional Texts
Authors: Berfin Aktas, Michael Roth
Accepted at: acl25

Clarifying Underspecified Discourse Relations in Instructional Texts

Berfin Aktaş
Natural Language Understanding Lab
University of Technology Nuremberg
berfin.aktas@utn.de

Michael Roth
Natural Language Understanding Lab
University of Technology Nuremberg
michael.roth@utn.de

Abstract
Discourse relations contribute to the structure of a text and can optionally be realized through explicit connectives such as ‘but’ and ‘while’. But when are these connectives necessary to avoid possible misunderstandings? We investigate this question by first building a corpus of 4,274 text revisions in each of which a connective was explicitly inserted. For a subset of 250 cases, we collect plausibility annotations on other connectives to check whether they would represent suitable alternative relations. The results of this annotation show that several relations are often perceived as plausible in our data. Furthermore, we analyze the extent to which large language models can identify instances with multiple plausible relations as a possible source of misunderstandings. We find that the models predict plausibility of individual connectives with up to 66% accuracy, but they are not reliable in estimating when multiple relations are plausible.

1 Introduction
Discourse relations play a crucial role in establishing coherence and logical flow between discourse segments in natural language. Unlike genres such as narratives or news, where ambiguity may be acceptable or even desirable, instructional texts should have a single clear meaning to ensure that readers can effectively follow the instructions. That is, while discourse relations in general can often be inferred by readers implicitly based on context and prior knowledge, instructions for a new task or unfamiliar domain may require the connection between steps to be explicit to avoid confusion (e.g. when steps can be carried out in any order versus only in a specific sequence). However, it has not been fully explored when the introduction of a connective (e.g. ‘meanwhile’, ‘afterwards’) alters the perceived plausibility of discourse relations.

As a starting point for studying when an implicit or explicit relation affects plausibility, we focus on revisions of instructional texts involving the explicit insertion of discourse connectives (i.e., explicitation of discourse relations), which we consider a form of clarification. Specifically, we utilize wikiHow guidelines.1 which have similarly been used in past studies to investigate other types of clarifications, such as the strengthening of arguments, resolution of vagueness and specifications of references (Afrin and Litman, 2018; Debnavath and Roth, 2021; Anthonio and Roth, 2021).

In this work, we present a novel corpus of instructional texts where explicit discourse connectives are inserted at the beginning of sentences in the revisions.2 An example of a pair of original and revised sentence, including one sentence from the preceding context, is shown in Example 1 below:

<table>
  <tr>
    <th colspan="2">How to Become a Registered Nurse</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td colspan="2">(...) Obtain a bachelor’s degree in nursing.<br>* Programs typically take four years to complete, and vary in cost depending on which institution you choose. _ _ Bachelor’s programs usually include more training in social sciences than other nursing programs.</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>✓ However</td>
    <td>✗ At the same time</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>✓ For example</td>
    <td>✗ Thus</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>✓ In addition</td>
    <td></td>
  </tr>
</table>

Table 1: Simplified example from our dataset. The top shows the title of a wikiHow guide, followed by a step name and description. In the revised version, the connective ‘However’ was inserted in place of _ _. Other connectives shown at the bottom are automatically generated, annotated as plausible (√) or implausible (✗).

(1) Attending… meetings may not always be fun.

Original: It can improve your relationship

1Available under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.
2The data is publicly available at https://github.com/berfingit/wikihow-connective-insertions.
and status with everyone at the workplace.

Revised: But it can improve your relationship and status with everyone at the workplace.

In total, our dataset contains 4,274 instances, making it a substantial resource of discourse relation explicitation. Our primary focus is on cases where the absence of explicit connectives could be a potential source of misunderstanding, which we investigate by examining situations where multiple discourse relations are perceived as plausible for the same arguments. To explore this, we conduct a crowdsourced study to collect plausibility ratings for various discourse connectives, each representing a different discourse relation, within the same context. The dataset includes both naturally occurring connectives from the revisions and synthetically generated alternatives, enabling us to investigate the plausibilities of multiple interpretations for the same arguments (for an example, see Table 1). By gathering independent human ratings for each option, our corpus supports linguistic analysis of underspecified discourse relations and provides a valuable resource for evaluating machine learning models that extend beyond single-class prediction.

We conduct further analysis on the data, addressing the following research questions:

RQ1 How frequently are multiple relations perceived as plausible for the same context in our data? On the other hand, how commonly is insertion of a connective redundant or unnecessary?

RQ2 What are examples of different plausible discourse relations that may conflict or co-exist?

RQ3 Can large language models predict when multiple relations are plausible, indicating potential sources of misunderstanding?

2 Background

As a general framework for (shallow) discourse relations, we rely on the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), which we discuss in more detail below (\S2.1). We further motivate this choice over other frameworks in Section 2.2.

2.1 PDTB Framework

In its latest version, PDTB-3, the Penn Discourse Treebank employs a three-level hierarchy for the semantic categorization of relations (i.e., sense labels). At the top level of the hierarchy is the 'class' label, which distinguishes between Expansion, Comparison, Contingency, and Temporal relations. Levels 2 and 3 further refine the class semantics, with level 3 encoding directionality (e.g., Temporal.Synchronous.Precedence)\footnote{Conventionally, levels are separated by dots.} and appearing only with asymmetric level-2 relations. In total, the PDTB hierarchy contains 36 fine-grained categories (full set listed in Appendix B).

PDTB-style annotations are performed on the level of semantically related arguments (Arg1 and Arg2), which are typically adjacent text segments. A discourse relation can be constructed through explicitly expressed discourse connectives (explicit relation) or inferred implicitly (implicit relation).

Annotating discourse relations is a challenging task, particularly because relations tend to be underspecified (Rohde et al., 2016; Webber et al., 2018; Scholman and Demberg, 2017; Scholman et al., 2022). While even explicit relations can have multiple readings (Pitler and Nenkova, 2009), implicit relations in particular are often interpreted in different ways (Rohde et al., 2016; Scholman et al., 2022), as reflected in low inter-annotator agreement compared to explicit relations (Zeyrek and Kurfahl, 2017; Hoek et al., 2021; Aktas and Özmen, 2024).

The ambiguity of implicit relations is also evident in the automatic classification of implicit discourse relations, as demonstrated by the performance gap between parsers handling explicit discourse relation recognition and implicit discourse relation recognition (Lin et al., 2014; Varia et al., 2019). Despite recent advances, classifying implicit relations remains a challenging task, especially for 2nd and 3rd level senses in the PDTB (Long and Webber, 2022; Chan et al., 2023). Recent studies suggest that applying modern prompting methods on large language models provides only marginal improvements in discourse parsing performance (Chan et al., 2024; Yung et al., 2024a).

Both manual annotation processes and computational discourse parsing studies indicate that explicit relations are easier to parse than implicit ones. Liu et al. (2024) demonstrate that removing explicit relations from texts often leads to a change in the perceived sense of the relation between arguments (referred to as label shift), highlighting that connectives are generally not redundant. Building on this, we investigate connective insertions and examine how the presence or absence of a connective impacts plausibility.
2.2 Why PDTB?
Another relevant framework for dealing with discourse relations that are not explicitly stated would be SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory; Asher and Lascarides, 2003). It uses a logical system (glue logic) to reveal how sentences are connected by relying on context and reasoning, grounded in dynamic semantics (Nouwen et al., 2022). In SDRT, inferred relations can be revised when new information contradicts the initial assumption, ensuring that the text maintains maximal discourse coherence. While SDRT is highly relevant for studying implicit discourse relations, we chose PDTB for the following main reasons:

• Our study examines revisions in instructional texts, particularly the insertion of discourse connectives. Since PDTB explicitly annotates connectives as standalone elements, it is directly applicable to our analysis.

• In our crowdsourcing experiments, workers are presented with only small portions of the text, as it would not be practical to ask them to read entire texts for each case. This focus on local coherence aligns with PDTB’s approach, which, unlike frameworks such as RST (Mann and Thompson, 1988) or SDRT (Asher and Lascarides, 2003), does not assume a global discourse structure. As a result, PDTB relations are non-hierarchical and are referred to as shallow discourse relations.

• Additionally, PDTB provides a large annotated corpus (Prasad et al., 2018) and has been widely used in relevant prior work by Yung et al. (2024b), Scholman et al. (2022) and others, which allows us to position our research within the existing literature and benefit from their resources.

3 Related Work
Explicitation of discourse relations has been widely studied in the context of Translation studies, particularly related to the Explicitation Hypothesis, which suggests that translations tend to be more explicit than their source texts (Blum-Kulka, 1986). Numerous studies have examined parallel texts to explore this hypothesis (e.g., Zufferey and Cartoni, 2014; Crible et al., 2019; Lapshinova-Koltunski et al., 2022), focusing largely on the insertion or omission of the connective in the translations. Yung et al. (2023) explore another form of explicitation, where a more specific connective is used in translation (e.g., translating “and” as “außerdem” in German), providing further evidence for the Explicitation Hypothesis.

In a study related to ours, Rohde et al. (2016) examine the interpretation of discourse relations and, through a crowdsourcing study framed as a connective insertion task, show that explicit markers and inferred conjunctions can coexist. This challenges the assumption that discourse relations are either explicit or inferred. In another crowdsourcing study, Yung et al. (2019) introduce a two-step method where workers first insert and then disambiguate connectives to annotate discourse relations, a method used for the DiscoGEM corpus (Scholman et al., 2022). Yung et al. (2024b) later refine this into a one-step procedure for annotating the DiscoGEM 2.0 corpus across multiple languages.

In the PDTB, the annotation of implicit relations involves first inserting a connective between the arguments, followed by labeling the relation’s sense (Prasad et al., 2008). Building on this approach, several works show that generating discourse connectives between the arguments of implicit relations enhances classification (Shi and Demberg, 2019; Zhou et al., 2022; Xiang et al., 2022; Liu and Strube, 2023; Wang et al., 2023; Wu et al., 2023). Our dataset, which includes numerous instances of connective insertion, can support future research on the automatic recognition of implicit relations, in particular with regard to settings where multiple relations are plausible.

4 Data Collection
The goal of this work is to analyze to what extent implicit discourse relations may require clarification in order to avoid potential of misunderstandings. As a foundation for this analysis, we construct a data set of discourse relation explicitations through connective insertion and plausibility judgments. We proceed in three steps: first, we extract 4,274 instances of connective insertions from wikiHow by comparing different versions of the same article (§4.1); second, we generate alternative connectives indicating different relations that may also be plausible (§4.2); and third, we collect annotations from human judges on which individual connectives are perceived as plausible (§4.3). Finally, we provide statistics on the dataset (§4.4).
4.1 Extraction of Connective Insertions
As a starting point for our data, we make use of revision histories of articles in wikiHow. Using the existing wikiHowToImprove dataset (Anthonio et al., 2020), which contains revisions on the sentence level, we identify cases where a connective is inserted in the revised version of a sentence.

We define an inventory of discourse connectives by first extracting annotated instances from the PDTB corpus and compiling a list of the 100 most frequent connectives.4 Connectives are known to be ambiguous in both their syntactic and semantic roles (Webber et al., 2019). For instance, words such as “and” can be ambiguous, functioning as a discourse connective. In Example 2, the first occurrence of ‘And’ is a discourse usage, whereas the second ‘and’ is a non-discourse usage.

(2) But don’t stress make this a week project. And keep a dairy, to write all your feelings and thoughts.5

To avoid the complexity of connective disambiguation, we focus on instances where the inserted tokens is most likely functioning as discourse connectives. Specifically, we select cases where a connective was added at the beginning of a sentence, with no other changes made between the original and revised versions.6 We provide statistics on the inserted connectives along with a brief discussion of what the distribution reveals in Appendix D.

4.2 Alternatives Generation
We employ two different methods to generate alternative connectives, both using the transformers library (Wolf et al., 2020), without additional pre-training. First, we frame the selection as a cloze task. For this method, we combine the revised sentence with the surrounding context and mask the connective at the beginning of the revision. Then a bidirectional masked language model (MLM), BERT-base-cased, predicts the masked token. From the first 50 predictions generated by the MLM, we extract those that matched the connective list from the PDTB and select the top two alternatives that differ from the original connective and signal semantically different relations. Since BERT predicts one token at a time, this method only produced single-token connectives.

We use an auto-regressive model (GPT-2) to handle multi-word connectives (e.g., "in other words," "for example"). The two best alternatives based on the perplexity scores are selected, again ensuring that they (semantically) differ from both the original connective and the MLM-based alternatives.7

4.3 Plausibility Annotation
The wikiHowToImprove data contains articles separated into train, development and test splits.8 Using the extraction approach outlined before, we identify a total of 4,274 cases of discourse connective insertion, with 3,457 in the training set, 409 in the development set, and 408 in the test set. For a subset of 250 cases (125 from the development and test set each), we generate four alternatives so that there are five variants: one variant with the original connective, two with the connectives predicted by a masked language model and two based on scores from the autoregressive model. For each variant (a total of 1250 instances), we collect annotations in the form of plausibility judgments by four crowd-workers using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Following previous work on plausibility (Anthonio et al., 2022), participants are asked to rate, on a scale from 1 to 5, how well an inserted part of text fits within the context.9

Context In PDTB, implicit relations are annotated only for adjacent sentences, and 91% of explicit relation arguments occur within the same or preceding sentence (Prasad et al., 2008). Bourgonje (2021) notes that only 2% of their PDTB-style annotations span more than two sentences. Therefore, we include the previous two sentences as context,

4While genres such as social media platforms (e.g., Twitter, now X) may feature connective forms not present in the PDTB corpus, such as abbreviations or slang (e.g., 'coz', 'cos', 'cus', and 'bc' for “because” or 'b4' for “before”; Aktas and Özmen, 2024), we assume these forms are rare in our dataset due to the edited nature of the content. Verifying this assumption could be an interesting topic for future research.

5All examples are taken from the wikiHowToImprove corpus, unless specified otherwise.

6In some instances, a comma was also added after the connective, and these cases are included as well.

7Note that a single connective might correspond to multiple relations (e.g., since). However, discourse relation labels (e.g., Comparison, Contrast) are challenging for untrained crowd workers to annotate. Therefore, we follow earlier studies (e.g., Wu et al. (2023); Wang et al. (2023)) and build an inventory of relatively unambiguous connectives. Specifically, combine data from (Yung et al., 2024b) and additional connectives found in our data (e.g., “in addition”).

8https://github.com/irshadbhat/wikiHowToImprove

9We decided to use a continuous scale such that participants can provide nuanced responses that fall between discrete categories. For example, participants might find a discourse relation partially plausible but not strongly so.
<table>
  <tr>
    <th></th>
    <th>Dev</th>
    <th>Test</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Plausible</td>
    <td>348 (55.7%)</td>
    <td>297 (47.5%)</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Implausible</td>
    <td>249 (39.8%)</td>
    <td>291 (46.5%)</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Neutral</td>
    <td>28 (4.5%)</td>
    <td>37 (6.0%)</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Total count</td>
    <td>625</td>
    <td>625</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Table 2: Distribution of plausibility judgments, based on majority aggregation of scores mapped to categories.

<table>
  <tr>
    <th></th>
    <th>Dev</th>
    <th>Test</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Instances</td>
    <td>625</td>
    <td>625</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Annotations</td>
    <td>2501</td>
    <td>2635<sup>10</sup></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Averaged agreement</td>
    <td>53.6%</td>
    <td>54.7%</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Majority agreement</td>
    <td>71.3%</td>
    <td>70.7%</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Averaged agr. (with MACE)</td>
    <td>55.2%</td>
    <td>57.9%</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Majority agr. (with MACE)</td>
    <td>72.4%</td>
    <td>73.0%</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Table 3: Inter-Annotator Agreement Statistics (Extended IAA Statistics can be found in Appendix A.)

either from the same or preceding paragraph (if two previous sentences are not available in the same paragraph). For paragraphs longer than three sentences, we also include the first sentence. Additionally, we include the following sentence from the same paragraph (if available), along with the article name and relevant section, to ensure sufficient context. The interface used in our Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) is shown in the Appendix I. We pay $0.25 per HIT to ensure participants earn at least the minimum wage per hour.

Qualifications We implement several criteria in order to enhance the quality of the annotations. First, we only allow individuals located in the United States or the United Kingdom to increase the likelihood of selecting native English speakers. Second, participants must have a HIT approval rate of at least 98% and a minimum of 5,000 approved HITs. Finally, crowdworkers are required to pass a qualification test consisting of 10 questions, where they judge a set of clearly plausible and implausible cases that were selected by the authors from the wikiHow data. These 10 questions are also embedded within the actual HITs to monitor participants’ attention during the task. Any submissions from participants who answer less than 75% of these attention questions correctly are filtered out.

Class labels We map continuous scores to class labels by first applying two thresholds to the individual plausibility judgments (ranging from 1 to 5) and then aggregating the annotations using majority voting. Specifically, plausibility judgments with a score of \( \leq 2.5 \) are mapped to the label *implausible*, those with a score of \( \geq 4.0 \) to *plausible*, and scores between these thresholds are mapped to the label *neutral*.

4.4 Data Statistics

We collected a total of 5,136 annotations for the 1250 instances in our data (625 development and 625 test instances). On a scale from 1 to 5, the average plausibility judgment for the original connectives is 3.98, whereas this value is 2.98 for the alternative connectives we generated. The average plausibility is higher for MLM-predicted connectives (3.18) compared to those highest ranked by GPT-2 (2.77). In Table 2, we show the distribution over the class labels *plausible*, *implausible* and *neutral* over all annotated connectives.

The class labels are based on mapping each individual annotation to a class and then aggregating the labels based on majority vote. As shown in Table 3, agreement based on majority-aggregated values is relatively high, namely 71.3% and 70.7% for the development and test set, respectively. In comparison, agreement based on average-aggregated values would be lower, namely 53.6% and 54.7%. To assess in how far disagreements reflect different perspectives or potential errors, we employ MACE (Multi-Annotator Competence Estimation; Hovy et al., 2013) with a threshold of 0.5. In our pilot studies, 7-15% of submissions were flagged as low-quality. However, after integrating attention checks into the process (see §4.3), the number of low-quality submissions dropped significantly, with only an average of 5% being marked as such.

In our final design, MACE identified very few incompetent annotators, which had a minimal impact on overall inter-annotator agreement (see Table 3). As noted in Section 2, discourse relations can have multiple interpretations. Therefore, we believe that these agreement scores, well above chance level for the three label categories, indicate a reasonably

10Due to a miscalculation in the experimental process, we ended up collecting more than four judgments for some tasks.
<table>
  <tr>
    <th></th>
    <th>Dev</th>
    <th>Test</th>
    <th>\( \Sigma / \% \)</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Contexts</td>
    <td>125</td>
    <td>125</td>
    <td>250</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>1 plausible connective<br>— Only revision plausible</td>
    <td>15</td>
    <td>18</td>
    <td>13%</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>&gt;2 plausible connectives</td>
    <td>108</td>
    <td>98</td>
    <td>82%</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Revision not plausible</td>
    <td>26</td>
    <td>35</td>
    <td>24%</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Table 4: Overview of the plausibility judgments

high agreement between the crowd workers.

5 Data Analysis

A fundamental question of our work is whether the connective insertions observed in the data are necessary to avoid possible causes of misunderstandings. To answer this question, we examine how frequently different connectives in the same context are perceived as plausible. As shown in Table 4, participants in the crowdsourcing experiment annotated at least two different connectives as plausible in the vast majority of contexts (82%).11 There are only 33 (13%) contexts, in which a single connective was perceived as plausible.12 Surprisingly, the plausible connective is the actual insertion made during revision in only around half of these cases (16). In fact, there are 61 cases (24%) in which the connective inserted during revision is not perceived as plausible (i.e., it is judged as implausible or neutral). We next discuss automatically generated connectives (\S 5.1) and potentials for misunderstanding (\S 5.2).

5.1 Generated Connectives

As discussed in the data statistics (\S 4.4), automatically generated connectives generally received lower plausibility scores than the original connective identified from the revision history (2.98 vs. 3.98). However, we restricted the model outputs to connectives that indicate semantically different relations from the original connective.

Table 5 summarizes how often the original connective would have been in the top outputs of BERT and GPT-2. We limit this analysis to one-word connectives as the MLM task always requires one token to be predicted. In the development and test set, 98 and 101 instances, respectively, contain single-token connectives. Regarding the top-1 outputs,

<table>
  <tr>
    <th></th>
    <th>Dev</th>
    <th>Test</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Contexts with one token masked</td>
    <td>98</td>
    <td>101</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <th>MLM / BERT</th>
    <td colspan="2">Recall@1 34% 36%</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td></td>
    <td colspan="2">Recall@5 74% 67%</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td></td>
    <td colspan="2">Recall@50 98% 98%</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <th>GPT-2</th>
    <td colspan="2">Recall@1 8% 7%</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td></td>
    <td colspan="2">Recall@5 71% 74%</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Table 5: Performance of top model outputs in generating the connective inserted during revision.

BERT predicts a substantially higher number of these connectives than GPT-2 (about 35% vs. 8%). Among the top 5, BERT and GPT-2 achieve about the same performance (67% vs. 74% Recall@5). Finally, we find 98% of the original connectives among BERT’s top-50 predictions. We conclude from this analysis that the generated connectives demonstrate a high degree of reliability.

5.2 Multiple Plausible Relations

As discussed in Section 4.2, we selected model-generated connectives such that they signal semantically different relations. In consequence, this means that when two or more connectives are judged as plausible, then multiple discourse relations seem applicable for the same arguments.13

The confusion matrix in Figure 5 in Appendix K illustrates which pairs of discourse relations are perceived as plausible in the same contexts, based on the connectives annotated in our dataset.14 While prior studies have examined concurrent relations among the same arguments, the non-uniform distribution of connectives proposed by language models in our experiment makes direct comparisons challenging. Still, some interesting patterns emerge.

Torabi Asr and Demberg (2013) identify frequent co-occurrences like (Conjunction&Syncrhonous) and (Synchronous&Result) in PDTB, which also appear in our dataset. Similarly, Scholman et al. (2022) report (Conjunction&Result) and (Precedence&Result) as frequent, aligning with our findings. However, co-occurrences with Arg2-as-detail are common in their dataset but absent from ours, likely due to

11Appendix C shows a full distribution over plausibilities.
12An analysis of the correlation between argument length and multiple connectives is provided in Appendix E.
13Note that while generated connectives are mostly unambiguous, the original insertions can be an underspecified connective such as “and”. Therefore, two connectives may not always signal different relations.
14This analysis uses the most frequent relation sense for each connective, given in Appendix J.
the rarity of connectives indicating these relations (e.g., "in fact") in our data. A notable difference in our data is the (Synchronous&Precedence) co-occurrence, which neither study reports. These variations may stem from genre differences, motivating further investigation.

We note that while some relations can coexist (e.g., Conjunction and Arg2-as-instance), others are mutually exclusive. For example, synchronous and asynchronous temporal relations cannot occur simultaneously. In contexts where both are perceived as plausible, as commonly observed in Figure 5 between Synchronous&Precedence senses, the absence of an explicitly realized relation is likely to result in misunderstandings.

The context in Example (3) provides an actual example from our data, highlighting another potential case of misunderstanding.

(3) If you have a double sink, plug up the other side with a wet rag. Or, you can do the same process on both sides with two plungers, with a friend or with both your hands holding a plunger.

As shown, the relation Expansion.Disjunction is signaled by the connective 'or' inserted during revision. In our data collection, we found annotators to also mark the connective 'then' as plausible, which denotes a Temporal.Asynchronous.Precedence relation. While the Expansion.Disjunction relation indicates two mutually exclusive events, the temporal relation implies that the second event must also occur. Therefore, the absence of any connective in this context may lead to confusion about the correct event sequence.

6 Computational Experiments

In Section 4, we discussed the creation of our data and showed that multiple plausible relations exist for many of the selected contexts (81%). Our analysis in Section 5 has shown that some of the relations perceived as plausible are mutually exclusive, indicating that a lack of discourse relation explicitation could lead to misunderstanding. In the following, we investigate whether more recent large language models (LLMs) can predict which connectives are plausible in a given context15 and, by extension,

<table>
  <tr>
    <th></th>
    <th>Binary</th>
    <th>Scale</th>
    <th>3-way</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Chance baseline</td>
    <td>50.0</td>
    <td>33.3</td>
    <td>33.3</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Majority class</td>
    <td>50.5</td>
    <td>47.5</td>
    <td>47.5</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td><b>GPT4o-mini</b></td>
    <td>62.4</td>
    <td><b>48.3</b></td>
    <td>52.5</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td><b>Gemini-1.5-flash</b></td>
    <td><b>64.6</b></td>
    <td>41.6</td>
    <td><b>59.0</b></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td><b>Claude3-haiku</b></td>
    <td>59.9</td>
    <td>45.6</td>
    <td>57.8</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td><b>GPT4o</b></td>
    <td>61.6</td>
    <td>47.7</td>
    <td>57.8</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td><b>Gemini-1.5-pro</b></td>
    <td><b>66.2</b></td>
    <td><b>64.8</b></td>
    <td><b>61.4</b></td>
  </tr>
</table>

Table 6: Accuracy scores across different models in the two-way and three-way classification tasks. Bolded values indicate the highest scores within each group.

whether multiple relations are plausible, signalling a potential source of misunderstanding.

6.1 Setup

The setup for the computational experiments largely follows the setup of our annotation study (\S4.3), with some variation in the required output. That is, we prompt models with the article name, section and context as input, and ask for a plausibility judgment on the highlighted connective (marked by underscores) as output. We experiment with three configurations for the output: a Binary (Plausible or Implausible), a 3-way categorization (Plausible, Implausible, or Neutral), and a five-point Scale-based classification (1–5).

We conduct our experiments on the test set of the annotated data to establish a baseline. We evaluate five LLMs in a zero-shot setting: GPT4o-mini, GPT4o (OpenAI et al., 2024) (via the OpenAI API), Gemini-1.5-flash, Gemini-1.5-Pro (GeminiTeam et al., 2024) (via the Google API), and Claude3-haiku16 (Anthropic, 2024) (via the Amazon Bedrock API).17 The temperature was set to 1 for all experiments. We used the development set of our data for selecting prompts, and we used the same prompts for all models on the test set (for examples, see Appendix F).

6.2 Results

Table 6 presents the performance of the LLMs across the three setups. For each, we provide results in terms of accuracy (i.e., the ratio of outcomes that align with the majority voting based on

15Note that we also used language models in the creation of our data. However the applied models, BERT and GPT-2, also produced many implausible connectives (\S4.4).
16The larger version of Claude (Sonnet) failed to follow the provided instructions.
17We attempted to include Llama as a more open model in our evaluation, but we neither got the small nor the large version to adhere to our instructions.
<table>
  <tr>
    <th></th>
    <th>MSE ↓</th>
    <th>MAE ↓</th>
    <th>PCC ↑</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Human</td>
    <td>2.25</td>
    <td>1.19</td>
    <td>0.44</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>GPT4o-mini</td>
    <td>2.40</td>
    <td>1.28</td>
    <td>0.41</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td><b>Gemini-1.5-flash</b></td>
    <td><b>1.21</b></td>
    <td><b>0.87</b></td>
    <td>0.42</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Claude3-haiku</td>
    <td>1.54</td>
    <td>1.00</td>
    <td>0.29</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>GPT4o</td>
    <td>2.11</td>
    <td>1.20</td>
    <td>0.43</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td><b>Gemini-1.5-pro</b></td>
    <td><b>2.12</b></td>
    <td><b>1.15</b></td>
    <td><b>0.51</b></td>
  </tr>
</table>

Table 7: Error and correlation results on the scale-based classification task using raw scores. Human results reflect the average deviation of individual human ratings from the average aggregated vote of other annotators. Bolded values indicate the best scores, i.e. lowest mean squared (MSE) or mean absolute error (MAE) and highest Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC).

human judgments).18 In the scale-based setup, predicted scores are mapped to three classes using the same thresholds defined during annotation (§4.3). We also report continuous metrics based on the raw scores in Table 7. These continuous metrics show that several LLMs outperform individual human performance in different ways: Gemini-1.5-flash provides the closest absolute predictions, while Gemini-1.5-pro best captures relative plausibility patterns. This suggests that LLMs can, in some cases, surpass agreement by human annotators on this task in a scale-based setting.

Plausibility of connectives For individual plausibility predictions, the LLM performance always lies well above the chance level, but below the majority-aggregated human agreement (70.7% in Table 3). The models also consistently outperform the majority baseline, except in scale-based setup, where only GPT4o-mini achieves a higher accuracy among the smaller models. All models, except Gemini-1.5-pro, perform better at predicting the class label directly, rather than predicting a score (up to +17.4 percentage points). Overall, the scale-based setup presents greater challenges for all models except Gemini-1.5-pro, which achieves outstanding performance in this setup, surpassing the second-best score by +16.5 points. The experiments reveal that larger models do not always guarantee better performance; for instance, GPT4o-mini outperforms GPT4o in the binary and scale setups. Among all models, Gemini-1.5-pro delivers the best performance across all setups, achieving results close to the human agreement upper bound.19

On the binary classification task, all LLMs achieve comparable accuracy scores, between 59.9% and 66.2%. On closer inspection, it is noticeable that the models differ greatly in their errors: While GPT4o models and Claude have a strong preference for the Plausible label, which is predicted in about 75% of cases, Gemini’s predictions (and errors) are more evenly spread across all labels. In summary, we find that the models show different strengths, and there is no significant advantage of one model over the others when it comes to individual plausibility predictions.

Multiple relations As a starting point for assessing when multiple relations are plausible, we combine plausibility judgments over all connectives for each context. We then check when two or more connectives are plausible according to the human annotation as well as according to the model predictions. The results are summarized in Table 8. Similar to the individual plausibility predictions, we observe that GPT4o models and Claude have a tendency of predicting too many relations as plausible, whereas Gemini predicts too few relations as plausible. Still, the performance on the context level is relatively high, with GPT4o and Claude reaching accuracy scores between 79.2% and 80.8%.

Although these results appear promising in terms of numbers, there are at least two limitations with regard to predicting potential causes of misunderstandings. As already discussed in Section 5.2, only some discourse relations are mutually exclusive, which is why cases with two or more plausible connectives might as well be unproblematic. Nevertheless, the proportion of contexts in which multiple connectives are rated as plausible remains so high that even the best model’s predictions barely outperform a baseline that always predicts two or more connectives as plausible.20

7 Discussion

We briefly summarize our findings with respect to the research questions introduced in Section 1.

RQ1. How frequently are multiple relations perceived as plausible for the same context in our data?

18 As shown in Table 3, agreement of averaged continuous scores is relatively low compared to majority-based agreement. This indicates that averaging is more sensitive to the influence of outliers. By employing majority voting, we prioritized annotator consensus as a more robust representation.

19 Additional experiments for the binary setup in a few-shot setting are provided in Appendix G.

20 As shown in Table 8, 95 out of 125 contexts (76%) contain more than one plausible judgment.
<table>
  <tr>
    <th rowspan="2"> </th>
    <th colspan="4">≤1 plausible connective</th>
    <th colspan="4">≥2 plausible connectives</th>
    <th colspan="2">all contexts</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <th>#</th>
    <th>P (%)</th>
    <th>R (%)</th>
    <th>F₁</th>
    <th>#</th>
    <th>P (%)</th>
    <th>R (%)</th>
    <th>F₁</th>
    <th>wF₁</th>
    <th>acc. (%)</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Gold annotation</td>
    <td>30</td>
    <td>—</td>
    <td>—</td>
    <td>—</td>
    <td>95</td>
    <td>—</td>
    <td>—</td>
    <td>—</td>
    <td>—</td>
    <td>—</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>GPT4o-mini</td>
    <td>16</td>
    <td><b>68.8</b></td>
    <td>36.7</td>
    <td>47.8</td>
    <td>109</td>
    <td>82.6</td>
    <td><b>94.7</b></td>
    <td><b>88.2</b></td>
    <td><b>78.5</b></td>
    <td><b>80.8</b></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Gemini-1.5-flash</td>
    <td>34</td>
    <td>41.2</td>
    <td>46.7</td>
    <td>43.7</td>
    <td>91</td>
    <td>82.4</td>
    <td>78.9</td>
    <td>80.6</td>
    <td>71.8</td>
    <td>71.2</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Claude3-haiku</td>
    <td>18</td>
    <td>61.1</td>
    <td>36.7</td>
    <td>45.8</td>
    <td>107</td>
    <td>82.2</td>
    <td>92.6</td>
    <td>87.1</td>
    <td>77.2</td>
    <td>79.2</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>GPT4o</td>
    <td>17</td>
    <td>52.9</td>
    <td>30.0</td>
    <td>38.3</td>
    <td>108</td>
    <td>80.6</td>
    <td>91.6</td>
    <td>85.7</td>
    <td>74.4</td>
    <td>76.8</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Gemini-1.5-pro</td>
    <td>61</td>
    <td>37.7</td>
    <td><b>76.7</b></td>
    <td><b>50.5</b></td>
    <td>64</td>
    <td><b>89.1</b></td>
    <td>60.0</td>
    <td>71.7</td>
    <td>66.6</td>
    <td>64.0</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Table 8: Performance of LLMs on identifying the number of plausible connectives (≤1 vs. ≥2) in a given context. Gold annotation counts by humans are shown above model prediction counts for each class and corresponding results. As evaluation measures, we report precision (P), recall (R), and their harmonic mean (F₁) per class, along with weighted F₁-score (wF₁) and overall accuracy (acc.) across classes.

On the other hand, how commonly is insertion of a connective redundant or unnecessary?

For the vast majority of the arguments, we found in the collected data that two or more connectives are annotated as plausible (81%, see §4.4). In contrast, there are only a few cases where the original connective is perceived as the only plausible option (7%). This indicates that the insertion of connectives as part of a revision is usually not redundant.

RQ2. What are examples of different plausible discourse relations that may conflict or co-exist?

In our analysis, we frequently found multiple discourse relations to be perceived as plausible in the same context (see §5.2). Some of these relations can co-exist (e.g. Expansion.Conjunction and Expansion.Instantiation.Arg2-as-instance) while others are conflicting (e.g. Temporal.Precedence and Expansion.Disjunction). Future work should explore in more detail when two or more relations can hold simultaneously, as context may also influence which relations are mutually exclusive.

RQ3. Can large language models predict when multiple relations are plausible, indicating potential sources of misunderstanding?

Our experiments with five LLMs revealed that predicting the plausibility of connectives in a given context is possible well above chance level, with Gemini performing best but still below the human agreement upper bound (see §6). When we compare individual plausibility judgments of LLMs with human plausibility annotations, we find that GPT and Claude tend to overpredict plausibility, while Gemini underpredicts it. In consequence, our experiments do not confirm the reliability of LLMs in predicting when multiple relations are plausible, despite seemingly high accuracy scores.

8 Conclusion

We introduced a dataset of 4,274 text revisions with explicit connective insertions, along with a subset containing crowdsourced plausibility judgments on alternative connectives. In many cases, we found that not only was the inserted connective perceived as plausible, but other alternative connectives, sometimes indicating different discourse relations, were also judged as plausible. For relations that are mutually exclusive, this suggests that the lack of an explicit connective oftentimes implies a potential source of misunderstanding.

We also conducted experiments with LLMs to automatically predict the plausibility of different markers in the same contexts. While the results are promising regarding individual relations, LLMs struggle to correctly identify when multiple or conflicting relations are plausible. Future research should investigate in more depth the extent to which models exhibit discourse understanding relevant to our task. For example, Miao et al. (2024) propose a question-answering-based method to evaluate the “faithfulness” by testing whether LLMS predictions remain consistent when the direction of a discourse relation between the same arguments is reversed (e.g., result vs. reason).

While our study is grounded in the PDTB framework, the focus on misunderstandings that can arise from missing explicit connectives suggests that applying a dynamic and structured framework such as SDRT could offer further valuable insights.

Acknowledgements

The research presented in this paper was funded by the DFG Emmy Noether program (RO 4848/2-1).
Limitations

This study has several limitations. It focuses exclusively on how-to guides from wikiHow, which may not represent other discourse genres, and examines only English-language texts, leaving the behavior of discourse connectives in other languages unexplored. Additionally, the comparison with existing literature is limited, particularly regarding concurrent relations. Unlike other studies that provide a full set of connectives covering all relation senses in PDTB, our experiment did not include such a comprehensive set for plausibility judgments. Future research should conduct controlled experiments, particularly providing uniform relation sense distribution for plausibility judgments, to better understand concurrent relations within this genre. Moreover, the crowdsourced plausibility judgments, while quality-controlled, inherently involve subjectivity, which may affect the consistency of the results.

References

Tazin Afrin and Diane Litman. 2018. Annotation and classification of sentence-level revision improvement. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 240–246, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Berfin Aktas and Burak Özmen. 2024. Shallow discourse parsing on Twitter conversations. In Proceedings of the 20th Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 60–65, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.

Talita Anthonio, Irshad Bhat, and Michael Roth. 2020. wikiHowToImprove: A resource and analyses on edits in instructional texts. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5721–5729, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.

Talita Anthonio and Michael Roth. 2021. Resolving implicit references in instructional texts. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse, pages 58–71, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic and Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Talita Anthonio, Anna Sauer, and Michael Roth. 2022. Clarifying implicit and underspecified phrases in instructional text. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3319–3330, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.

Anthropic. 2024. The claude 3 model family: Opus, sonnet, haiku. Technical report, Anthropic.

Nicholas Asher and Alex Lascarides. 2003. Logics of Conversation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Shoshana Blum-Kulka. 1986. Shifts of cohesion and coherence in translation. In Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka, editors, Interlingual and Intercultural Communication: Discourse and Cognition in Translation and Second Language Acquisition Studies, pages 17–35. Gunter Narr Verlag, Tübingen.

Peter Bourgonje. 2021. Shallow discourse parsing for German. doctoralthesis, Universität Potsdam.

Chunkit Chan, Cheng Jiayang, Weiqi Wang, Yuxin Jiang, Tianqing Fang, Xin Liu, and Yangqiu Song. 2024. Exploring the potential of ChatGPT on sentence level relations: A focus on temporal, causal, and discourse relations. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024, pages 684–721, St. Julian’s, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Chunkit Chan, Xin Liu, Jiayang Cheng, Zihan Li, Yangqiu Song, Ginny Wong, and Simon See. 2023. DiscoPrompt: Path prediction prompt tuning for implicit discourse relation recognition. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 35–57, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Ludvigue Crible, Ágnes Abuczki, Nijolė Burkšaitienė, Péter Furkó, Anna Nedoluzhko, and Sigita Rackevičienė. 2019. Functions and translations of discourse markers in ted talks: A parallel corpus study of underspecification in five languages. Journal of Pragmatics, 142:139–155.

Alok Debnath and Michael Roth. 2021. A computational analysis of vagueness in revisions of instructional texts. In Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop, pages 30–35, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.

GeminiTeam, Petko Georgiev, Ving Ian Lee, et al. 2024. Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context. Preprint, arXiv:2403.05530.

Jet Hoek, Merel C.J. Scholman, and Ted J.M. Sanders. 2021. Is there less agreement when the discourse is underspecified? In Proceedings of the DiscAnn Workshop.

Dirk Hovy, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Ashish Vaswani, and Eduard Hovy. 2013. Learning whom to trust with MACE. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 1120–1130, Atlanta, Georgia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Christina Polkläsener, and Heike Przybyl. 2022. Exploring explicitation and implicitation in parallel interpreting and translation corpora. The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics, 119:5–22.

Ziheng Lin, Hwee Tou Ng, and Min-Yen Kan. 2014. A pdtb-styled end-to-end discourse parser. Natural Language Engineering, 20(2):151–184.

Wei Liu and Michael Strube. 2023. Annotation-inspired implicit discourse relation classification with auxiliary discourse connective generation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 15696–15712, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Wei Liu, Stephen Wan, and Michael Strube. 2024. What causes the failure of explicit to implicit discourse relation recognition? In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2738–2753, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Wanqiu Long and Bonnie Webber. 2022. Facilitating contrastive learning of discourse relational senses by exploiting the hierarchy of sense relations. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10704–10716, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.

William Mann and Sandra Thompson. 1988. Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse, 8(3):243–281.

Wes McKinney et al. 2010. Data structures for statistical computing in python. In Proceedings of the 9th Python in Science Conference, volume 445, pages 51–56. Austin, TX.

Yisong Miao, Hongfu Liu, Wenqiang Lei, Nancy Chen, and Min-Yen Kan. 2024. Discursive socratic questioning: Evaluating the faithfulness of language models’ understanding of discourse relations. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6277–6295, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.

John D. Murray. 1997. Connectives and narrative text: The role of continuity. Memory & Cognition, 25(2):227–236.

Rick Nouwen, Adrian Brasoveanu, Jan van Eijck, and Albert Visser. 2022. Dynamic Semantics. In Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman, editors, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2022 edition. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

OpenAI, Josh Achiam, Steven Adler, et al. 2024. Gpt-4 technical report. Preprint, arXiv:2303.08774.

Emily Pitler and Ani Nenkova. 2009. Using syntax to disambiguate explicit discourse connectives in text. In Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Conference Short Papers, pages 13–16, Suntec, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Rashmi Prasad, Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, Eleni Mitsakaki, Livio Robaldo, Aravind Joshi, and Bonnie Webber. 2008. The Penn Discourse TreeBank 2.0. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

Rashmi Prasad, Bonnie Webber, and Alan Lee. 2018. Discourse annotation in the PDTB: The next generation. In Proceedings 14th Joint ACL - ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation, pages 87–97, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Hannah Rohde, Anna Dickinson, Nathan Schneider, Christopher N. L. Clark, Annie Louis, and Bonnie Webber. 2016. Filling in the blanks in understanding discourse adverbials: Consistency, conflict, and context-dependence in a crowdsourced elicitation task. In Proceedings of the 10th Linguistic Annotation Workshop held in conjunction with ACL 2016 (LAW-X 2016), pages 49–58, Berlin, Germany. Association for Computational Linguistics.

T.J.M. Sanders. 2005. Coherence, causality and cognitive complexity in discourse. In Proceedings of the First International Symposium on the Exploration and Modelling of Meaning, pages 31–46, France. Universite de Toulouse-Le Mirail.

Merel Scholman and Vera Demberg. 2017. Crowdsourcing discourse interpretations: On the influence of context and the reliability of a connective insertion task. In Proceedings of the 11th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, pages 24–33, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Merel Scholman, Tianai Dong, Frances Yung, and Vera Demberg. 2022. DiscoGeM: A crowdsourced corpus of genre-mixed implicit discourse relations. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3281–3290, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.

Erwin M. Segal and Judith Felson Duchan. 1991. The role of interclausal connectives in narrative structuring: Evidence from adults’ interpretations of simple stories. Discourse Processes, 14:24–54.

Wei Shi and Vera Demberg. 2019. Learning to explicitate connectives with Seq2Seq network for implicit discourse relation classification. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Long Papers, pages 188–199, Gothenburg, Sweden. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Fatemeh Torabi Asr and Vera Demberg. 2012. Implicitness of discourse relations. In Proceedings of COLING 2012, pages 2669–2684, Mumbai, India. The COLING 2012 Organizing Committee.

Fatemeh Torabi Asr and Vera Demberg. 2013. On the information conveyed by discourse markers. In Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL), pages 84–93, Sofia, Bulgaria. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Siddharth Varia, Christopher Hidey, and Tuhin Chakrabarty. 2019. Discourse relation prediction: Revisiting word pairs with convolutional networks. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 442–452, Stockholm, Sweden. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Chenxu Wang, Ping Jian, and Mu Huang. 2023. Prompt-based logical semantics enhancement for implicit discourse relation recognition. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 687–699, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Bonnie Webber, Rashmi Prasad, and Alan Lee. 2019. Ambiguity in explicit discourse connectives. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics - Long Papers, pages 134–141, Gothenburg, Sweden. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Bonnie Webber, Rashmi Prasad, Alan Lee, and Aravind Joshi. 2018. The Penn Discourse Treebank 3.0 Annotation Manual. Report, The University of Pennsylvania.

Thomas Wolf, Lysandre Debut, Victor Sanh, Julien Chaumond, Clement Delangue, Anthony Moi, Pierre Cistac, Tim Rault, Remi Louf, Morgan Funtowicz, Joe Davison, Sam Shleifer, Patrick von Platen, Clara Ma, Yacine Jernite, Julien Plu, Canwen Xu, Teven Le Scao, Sylvain Gugger, Mariama Drame, Quentin Lhoest, and Alexander Rush. 2020. Transformers: State-of-the-art natural language processing. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 38–45, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Hongyi Wu, Hao Zhou, Man Lan, Yuanbin Wu, and Yadong Zhang. 2023. Connective prediction for implicit discourse relation recognition via knowledge distillation. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5908–5923, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Wei Xiang, Zhenglin Wang, Lu Dai, and Bang Wang. 2022. ConnPrompt: Connective-cloze prompt learning for implicit discourse relation recognition. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 902–911, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea. International Committee on Computational Linguistics.

Frances Yung, Mansoor Ahmad, Merel Scholman, and Vera Demberg. 2024a. Prompting implicit discourse relation annotation. In Proceedings of The 18th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVIII), pages 150–165, St. Julians, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Frances Yung, Vera Demberg, and Merel Scholman. 2019. Crowdsourcing discourse relation annotations by a two-step connective insertion task. In Proceedings of the 13th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, pages 16–25, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Frances Yung, Merel Scholman, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Christina Polklässener, and Vera Demberg. 2023. Investigating explicitation of discourse connectives in translation using automatic annotations. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 21–30, Prague, Czechia. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Frances Yung, Merel Scholman, Sarka Zikanova, and Vera Demberg. 2024b. DiscoGem 2.0: A parallel corpus of English, German, French and Czech implicit discourse relations. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 4940–4956, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.

Deniz Zeyrek and Murathan Kurfali. 2017. TDB 1.1: Extensions on Turkish discourse bank. In Proceedings of the 11th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, pages 76–81, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Hao Zhou, Man Lan, Yuanbin Wu, Yuefeng Chen, and Meirong Ma. 2022. Prompt-based connective prediction method for fine-grained implicit discourse relation recognition. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 3848–3858, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Sandrine Zufferey and Bruno Cartoni. 2014. A multifactorial analysis of explicitation in translation. Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, 26(3):361–384.

A Appendix: Extended Agreement Statistics

Table 9 presents additional agreement statistics. In both the 3-way and 2-way setups, the average aggregated agreement is computed by averaging plausibility scores (ranging from 1 to 5) and mapping them to categories, as described in Section 4.3. The key difference between these setups is that the
<table>
  <tr>
    <th></th>
    <th>Dev</th>
    <th>Test</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Instances</td>
    <td>625</td>
    <td>625</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Annotations</td>
    <td>2501</td>
    <td>2635</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Averaged agr. (3-way)</td>
    <td>53.6%</td>
    <td>54.7%</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Majority agr. (3-way)</td>
    <td>71.3%</td>
    <td>70.7%</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Averaged agr. (2-way)</td>
    <td>57.1%</td>
    <td>59.2%</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Majority agr. (2-way)</td>
    <td>79.4%</td>
    <td>79.9%</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Averaged agr. (scale-row)</td>
    <td>12%</td>
    <td>11.7%</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Majority agr. (scale-row)</td>
    <td>57.7%</td>
    <td>57%</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Majority agr. (scale-mapped)</td>
    <td>70.4%</td>
    <td>69.5%</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Table 9: Extended Inter-Annotator Agreement Statistics

2-way agreement statistics exclude the "neutral" labels.

In contrast, the scale-row setup directly operates on the raw scores. The average agreement calculated over raw scores is considerably lower than other agreement measures because it involves comparing individual plausibility judgments with averaged scores, which are often decimal values, resulting in lower agreement. This metric is included only for demonstration purposes.

As shown in the table, we also report the majority aggregated agreement for the scale-mapped setting, where scores are first aggregated and then mapped to three categories, as outlined in Section 4.3. The difference between “Majority agr. (3-way)” and “Majority agr. (scale-mapped)” lies in the sequence of operations: in the former, mapping is applied before aggregation, whereas in the latter, aggregation precedes mapping. This explains why their values are similar.

For comparison with the LLM results, we designate “Majority agr. (3-way)” as the human upper bound for the scale-based setting as well. This is because, in the LLM experiments, the only difference between the scale-based and 3-way classification tasks is in how data is collected from LLMs. In both cases, the model responses are first mapped to the three predefined categories, and then the majority aggregated agreement is computed.

B Appendix: PDTB-3 Sense Hierarchy

<table>
  <tr>
    <th>Level-1</th>
    <th>Level-2</th>
    <th>Level-3</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td rowspan="2">TEMPORAL</td>
    <td>SYNCHRONOUS</td>
    <td>—</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>ASYNCHRONOUS</td>
    <td>PRECEDENCE<br>SUCCESSION</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td rowspan="12">CONTINGENCY</td>
    <td>CAUSB</td>
    <td>REASON<br>RESULT<br>NEGRESULT</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>CAUSB+BELIEF</td>
    <td>REASON+BELIEF<br>RESULT+BELIEF</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>CAUSB+SPEECHACT</td>
    <td>REASON+SPEECHACT<br>RESULT+SPEECHACT</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>CONDITION</td>
    <td>ARG1-AS-COMD<br>ARG2-AS-COMD</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>CONDITION+SPEECHACT</td>
    <td>ARG1-AS-SPECCOND<br>ARG2-AS-SPECCOND</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>NEGATIVE-CONDITION</td>
    <td>ARG1-AS-NEGCOND<br>ARG2-AS-NEGCOND</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>NEGATIVE-CONDITION+SPEECHACT</td>
    <td>ARG1-AS-NEGSPEC<br>ARG2-AS-NEGSPEC</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>PURPOSE</td>
    <td>ARG1-AS-GOAL<br>ARG2-AS-GOAL</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>CONCESSION</td>
    <td>ARG1-AS-DENIES<br>ARG2-AS-DENIES</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>CONCESSION+SPEECHACT</td>
    <td>ARG2-AS-DENIES+SPEECHACT</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>COMPARISON</td>
    <td>—</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>CONTRAST</td>
    <td>—</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>SIMILARITY</td>
    <td>—</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td rowspan="8">EXPANSION</td>
    <td>CONJUNCTION</td>
    <td>—</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>DISJUNCTION</td>
    <td>—</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>EQUIVALENCE</td>
    <td>—</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>EXCEPTION</td>
    <td>ARG1-AS-EXCEPT<br>ARG2-AS-EXCEPT</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>INSTANTIATION</td>
    <td>ARG2-AS-INSTANCE</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>LEVEL-OF-DETAIL</td>
    <td>ARG2-AS-DETAIL</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>MANNER</td>
    <td>ARG1-AS-MANNER<br>ARG2-AS-MANNER</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>SUBSTITUTION</td>
    <td>ARG1-AS-SUBST<br>ARG2-AS-SUBST</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Figure 1: PDTB-3 sense hierarchy (taken from Webber et al. (2018, p.17))

C Appendix: Frequency Distribution of Plausible Connectives

![Bar chart showing the distribution of the number of plausible connectives across all contexts in the development set](page_1012_1342_388_246.png)

Figure 2: Distribution of the number of plausible connectives across all contexts in the development set
Figure 3: Distribution of the number of plausible connectives across all contexts in the test set

D Appendix: Frequency Distribution of Inserted Connectives

Table 10 lists the 10 most frequent connectives found in the extracted connective insertion instances. The most commonly inserted discourse connectives are Then, For example/For instance21, and However/But.

In their analysis, Torabi Asr and Demberg (2012) examine why some relations are made explicit while others remain implicit, suggesting that the "expectedness" of a relation determines its explicitness. Based on the Continuity hypothesis (Segal and Duchan, 1991; Murray, 1997) and the Causality-by-default hypothesis (Sanders, 2005), they argue that continuous relations (e.g., causal relations) are more likely to be implicit, whereas discontinuous relations (e.g., temporal, comparison, and instantiation relations) are often explicit. They also propose that forward-temporal relations tend to be more implicit than other temporal relations.

When we examine our data alongside the connective-sense mappings in Table 1622, we observe that some of their findings align with our results. For example, comparison relations, signaled by connectives such as "However" and "But" are frequently explicitated, while causal relations, indicated by connectives like "So" and "Because" are rare. Temporal relations, however, reveal an intriguing exception. Although Torabi Asr and Demberg (2012) classify temporal relations as discontinuous and generally explicit, they also suggest that temporal relations following the textual order of arguments naturally tend to be implicit. Yet, in our dataset, the connective "Then" which denotes sequential events, is the most frequently inserted connective. As shown in Figure 5, the same arguments can often represent both temporal and other types of relations (e.g., Temporal.Asynchronous.Precedence vs. Comparison.Concession.Arg2-as-denier) in our experiments, suggesting that even for events in sequential order, temporal relations may not always be straightforwardly established.

Another notable difference involves Expansion.Instantiation relations. Torabi Asr and Demberg (2012) classify these relations as continuous and, therefore, more likely to be implicit. In contrast, our dataset shows that connectives such as "For example" and "For instance", which strongly signal instantiation, are the second most frequent connective insertions. These differences could stem from genre-specific factors, as Torabi Asr and Demberg (2012) analyzed PDTB news data, while our dataset consists of step-by-step procedural instructions. However, it is important to emphasize that these findings are based solely on connective insertions in the revisions at the beginnings of sentences and may not represent the entire dataset. Further exploration of how these hypotheses apply to the complete dataset is reserved for future research.

<table>
  <tr>
    <th>Connective</th>
    <th>%</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Then</td>
    <td>20.47</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>For example</td>
    <td>15.53</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>However</td>
    <td>12.95</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Also</td>
    <td>9.86</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>But</td>
    <td>5.50</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Or</td>
    <td>4.29</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>And</td>
    <td>4.11</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>So</td>
    <td>4.04</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>For instance</td>
    <td>3.23</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>If</td>
    <td>2.81</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Table 10: Top 10 most frequent connective insertions at the beginning of revisions

E Appendix: Do discourse relation arguments affect the number of plausible relations?

Liu et al. (2024) identify several factors that may
contribute to relation ambiguity when an explicit connective is removed, such as whether the connective is sentence-initial or medial or whether the arguments are too short to provide sufficient context. In our study, all discourse connectives appear at the sentence-initial position due to our selection criteria. However, we aimed to investigate whether argument length correlates with context ambiguity (i.e., existence of multiple plausible connectives for a given context). For this purpose, we manually marked the arguments for the originally inserted connectives in each context in the test set and conducted a small study to investigate whether argument lengths, measured in both tokens and characters, correlates with the number of plausible connectives.

This analysis was conducted using the corr() function from the pandas library (McKinney et al., 2010) with its default settings. 23 We analyzed both the raw number of plausible connectives and a binary setting, where we assigned a value of 1 if multiple connectives were plausible and 0 otherwise. However, as shown in Table 11, our findings did not reveal a significant correlation between these variables.

The results indicate a weak correlation between argument length and the presence of multiple plausible connectives, with a slightly higher correlation observed for Arg1. Despite its weakness, this correlation is positive, which contrasts with the expectations outlined in Liu et al. (2024). This discrepancy requires further investigation.

<table>
  <tr>
    <th></th>
    <th># of pl conns</th>
    <th>binary</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Arg1_Char</td>
    <td><b>0.23</b></td>
    <td>0.16</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Arg2_Char</td>
    <td>0.12</td>
    <td>0.09</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Arg1_Token</td>
    <td>0.22</td>
    <td>0.13</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Arg2_Token</td>
    <td>0.1</td>
    <td>0.08</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Arg_Sum_Char</td>
    <td><b>0.23</b></td>
    <td><b>0.17</b></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Arg_Sum_Token</td>
    <td>0.21</td>
    <td>0.14</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Table 11: Correlation matrix between argument lengths and the number of plausible connectives in the test set

23We used ChatGPT to generate the Python code, but we manually verified its correctness.

F Appendix: Prompt examples used in the computational experiments

Binary:

Does the text between the underscores make sense in the given how-to guide?
Please respond only with one word: Plausible or Implausible

Be a Successful Engineer
Being Successful in the Workplace
…
6. Make sure you show up at every meeting. Attending all the meetings may not always be fun. _But_ it can improve your relationship and status with everyone at the workplace. It shows you are really interested at being an engineer.

Three categories:

Does the text between the underscores make sense in the given how-to guide?
Please respond only with one word: Plausible, Implausible or Uncleara

Be a Successful Engineer
Being Successful in the Workplace
…
6. Make sure you show up at every meeting. Attending all the meetings may not always be fun. _But_ it can improve your relationship and status with everyone at the workplace. It shows you are really interested at being an engineer.

aUsing “Neutral” or “Undecided” did not yield responses in the third category, but “Unclear” was effective in achieving that.
Scale-based:

On a scale from 1 to 5, does the text between the underscores make sense in the given how-to guide?
(Please respond with only a single number between 1 and 5, where 1=complete nonsense, 5=definitely makes sense) Be a Successful Engineer
Being Successful in the Workplace ...
6. Make sure you show up at every meeting. Attending all the meetings may not always be fun. _But_ it can improve your relationship and status with everyone at the workplace. It shows you are really interested at being an engineer.

G Appendix: Few-shot experiment results

We conducted few-shot experiments only for the two-way classification task, as it is more straightforward to generate examples with clear plausible and implausible values compared to neutral or less plausible ones required for three-way and score-based classifications, respectively. We used the 10 questions from the qualification test as few-shot examples as they were specifically designed to ensure that their plausibility values are unambiguous. Two examples are provided below for demonstration.

Example 1
Be a Successful Engineer

Steps

...

6. Make sure you show up at every meeting. Attending all the meetings may not always be fun. _But_ it can improve your relationship and status with everyone at the workplace. It shows you are really interested in being an engineer.

Response: Plausible
Example 2
Deal With a Pregnant Mother

Steps

• Understand your mom and the baby. Your mom is probably going to be sick for the first weeks. She will get real big. _Rather than_, she will only be like this for nine months.

Response: Implausible

The results of the few-shot experiments are presented in Table 12. Across all models except Gemini-1.5-flash, we observe performance improvements, with a notable 5.3% increase for GPT4o-mini. In terms of overall performance, Gemini-1.5-pro and GPT4o-mini achieve similar results, with GPT4o-mini performing slightly better. However, despite these improvements, performance remains below the human agreement upper bound (79.9% in Table 9 for the 2-way setting), as seen in the zero-shot experiments. The 3.9% decline in Gemini-1.5-flash’s performance is particularly interesting and requires further investigation.

<table>
  <tr>
    <th></th>
    <th>Zero-shot</th>
    <th>Few-shot</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Chance baseline</td>
    <td>50.0</td>
    <td>50.0</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Majority class</td>
    <td>50.5</td>
    <td>50.5</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td><b>GPT4o-mini</b></td>
    <td>62.4</td>
    <td><b>67.7</b></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td><b>Gemini-1.5-flash</b></td>
    <td><b>64.6</b></td>
    <td>60.7</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Claude3-haiku</td>
    <td>59.9</td>
    <td>63.1</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td><b>GPT4o</b></td>
    <td>61.6</td>
    <td>66</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td><b>Gemini-1.5-pro</b></td>
    <td><b>66.2</b></td>
    <td><b>67</b></td>
  </tr>
</table>

Table 12: Accuracy scores across different models for the two-way classification task in a few-shot setting.
H Appendix: Additional metrics for the computational experiments

<table>
  <tr>
    <th rowspan="2">Model</th>
    <th colspan="3">Plausible</th>
    <th colspan="3">Implausible</th>
    <th colspan="2">All</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <th>P</th><th>R</th><th>F1</th>
    <th>P</th><th>R</th><th>F1</th>
    <th>WF1</th><th>ACC</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>GPT4o-mini</td>
    <td>58.8</td><td><b>89.9</b></td><td>70.7</td>
    <td>76.9</td><td>34.4</td><td>47.5</td>
    <td>59.2</td><td>62.4</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Gemini-1.5-flash</td>
    <td>63.4</td><td>70.7</td><td>66.9</td>
    <td>66.1</td><td>58.4</td><td>62.0</td>
    <td>64.5</td><td>64.6</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Claude3-haiku</td>
    <td>57.2</td><td>84.2</td><td>68.1</td>
    <td>74.5</td><td>35.1</td><td>47.7</td>
    <td>58.0</td><td>59.9</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>GPT4o</td>
    <td>58.1</td><td>85.5</td><td>69.2</td>
    <td>71.5</td><td>37.1</td><td>48.9</td>
    <td>59.1</td><td>61.6</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Gemini-1.5-pro</td>
    <td><b>70.1</b></td><td>57.6</td><td>63.2</td>
    <td>63.4</td><td><b>74.9</b></td><td><b>68.7</b></td>
    <td><b>65.9</b></td><td><b>66.2</b></td>
  </tr>
</table>

Table 13: Accuracy scores across different models in the two-way classification task. Bolded values indicate the highest scores. P: Precision, R: Recall, WF1: Weighted F1, ACC: Accuracy.

<table>
  <tr>
    <th rowspan="2">Model</th>
    <th colspan="3">Plausible</th>
    <th colspan="3">Implausible</th>
    <th colspan="2">Neutral</th>
    <th colspan="2">All</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <th>P</th><th>R</th><th>F1</th>
    <th>P</th><th>R</th><th>F1</th>
    <th>P</th><th>R</th><th>F1</th>
    <th>WF1</th><th>ACC</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>GPT4o-mini</td>
    <td>55.3</td><td><b>88.6</b></td><td>68.0</td>
    <td>80.5</td><td>21.3</td><td>33.7</td>
    <td>4.2</td><td><b>8.1</b></td><td>5.5</td>
    <td>48.4</td><td>52.5</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Gemini-1.5-flash</td>
    <td>58.2</td><td>74.1</td><td>65.2</td>
    <td>62.9</td><td>51.2</td><td>56.4</td>
    <td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td>
    <td>57.3</td><td>59.0</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Claude3-haiku</td>
    <td>54.1</td><td>88.2</td><td>67.1</td>
    <td>72.1</td><td>33.7</td><td>45.9</td>
    <td><b>25.0</b></td><td>2.7</td><td>4.9</td>
    <td>53.5</td><td>57.8</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>GPT4o</td>
    <td>55.6</td><td>82.5</td><td>66.4</td>
    <td>68.7</td><td>39.2</td><td>49.9</td>
    <td>11.1</td><td>5.4</td><td><b>7.3</b></td>
    <td>55.2</td><td>57.8</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Gemini-1.5-pro</td>
    <td><b>62.4</b></td><td>62.6</td><td>62.5</td>
    <td>60.7</td><td><b>68.0</b></td><td><b>64.2</b></td>
    <td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td>
    <td><b>59.6</b></td><td><b>61.4</b></td>
  </tr>
</table>

Table 14: Accuracy scores across different models in the three-way classification task. Bolded values indicate the highest scores. P: Precision, R: Recall, WF1: Weighted F1, ACC: Accuracy.

<table>
  <tr>
    <th rowspan="2">Model</th>
    <th colspan="3">Plausible</th>
    <th colspan="3">Implausible</th>
    <th colspan="2">Neutral</th>
    <th colspan="2">All</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <th>P</th><th>R</th><th>F1</th>
    <th>P</th><th>R</th><th>F1</th>
    <th>P</th><th>R</th><th>F1</th>
    <th>WF1</th><th>ACC</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>GPT4o-mini</td>
    <td>52.6</td><td><b>90.9</b></td><td>66.7</td>
    <td>78.0</td><td>11.0</td><td>19.3</td>
    <td>0.0</td><td>0.0</td><td>0.0</td>
    <td>40.7</td><td>48.3</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Gemini-1.5-flash</td>
    <td><b>76.5</b></td><td>35.0</td><td>48.0</td>
    <td>62.8</td><td>48.1</td><td>54.5</td>
    <td>6.5</td><td><b>43.2</b></td><td>11.3</td>
    <td>48.9</td><td>41.6</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Claude3-haiku</td>
    <td>55.2</td><td>77.1</td><td>64.3</td>
    <td>72.6</td><td>15.5</td><td>25.5</td>
    <td>7.4</td><td>29.7</td><td><b>11.9</b></td>
    <td>43.1</td><td>45.6</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>GPT4o</td>
    <td>56.2</td><td>88.2</td><td><b>68.7</b></td>
    <td><b>81.1</b></td><td>10.3</td><td>18.3</td>
    <td>4.9</td><td>16.2</td><td>7.5</td>
    <td>41.6</td><td>47.7</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Gemini-1.5-pro</td>
    <td>67.3</td><td>66.7</td><td>67.0</td>
    <td>64.3</td><td><b>70.4</b></td><td><b>67.2</b></td>
    <td><b>16.7</b></td><td>5.4</td><td>8.2</td>
    <td><b>63.6</b></td><td><b>64.8</b></td>
  </tr>
</table>

Table 15: Accuracy scores across different models in the three-way classification task (ratings were collected on a 1-to-5 scale and subsequently grouped into three categories as detailed in §4.3). Bolded values indicate the highest scores. P: Precision, R: Recall, WF1: Weighted F1, ACC: Accuracy
1 Appendix: Interface for Crowdsourcing Experiment

Instruction
Read the text below and indicate if the underlined part makes sense in the given how-to guide.

Please note the following criteria for task submissions:

• We expect workers to allocate sufficient time to each task. We reserve the right to reject submissions if they appear to be done in a rush.
• We include attention check questions in the HITs. If these questions are not answered correctly, we reserve the right to reject the submission.

Text

Rent a Laptop

Steps
(4.) Do you need to go online during the meeting and need a broadband card with all the laptops?
5. Search for a reliable company that has been in business for some time. On the other hand, search for a source that can deliver to your location hassle-free.

Question
On a scale from 1 to 5, does the underlined part make sense in the given how-to guide?

(1=complete nonsense, 5=definitely makes sense; ratings of 0 will be rejected)

Submit

Figure 4: Interface for collecting plausibility judgments
<table>
  <tr>
    <th>Connective</th>
    <th>Sense(s)</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>after</td>
    <td>Temp.Asynchronous.Succession</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>also</td>
    <td>Exp.Conjunction</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>although</td>
    <td>Comp.Concession.Arg1-as-denier</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>and</td>
    <td>Exp.Conjunction</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>as</td>
    <td>Temp.Synchronous</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>as a result</td>
    <td>Cont.Cause.Result</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>as if</td>
    <td>Exp.Manner.Arg2-as-manner</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>at the same time</td>
    <td>Temp.Synchronous</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>because</td>
    <td>Cont.Cause.Reason</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>before</td>
    <td>Temp.Asynchronous.Precedence</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>but</td>
    <td>Comp.Concession.Arg2-as-denier</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>consequently</td>
    <td>Cont.Cause.Result</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>even though</td>
    <td>Comp.Concession.Arg1-as-denier</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>finally</td>
    <td>Temporal.Asynchronous.Precedence</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>for example/instance</td>
    <td>Exp.Instantiation.Arg2-as-instance</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>for that purpose</td>
    <td>Cont.Purpose.Arg1-as-goal</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>furthermore</td>
    <td>Exp.Conjunction</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>however</td>
    <td>Comp.Concession.Arg2-as-denier</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>if</td>
    <td>Cont.Condition.Arg2-as-cond</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>if not</td>
    <td>Cont.Neg-condition.Arg1-as-negCond</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>in addition</td>
    <td>Exp.Conjunction</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>in fact</td>
    <td>Exp.Level-of-detail.Arg2-as-detail</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>in more detail</td>
    <td>Exp.Level-of-detail.Arg2-as-detail</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>in other words</td>
    <td>Exp.Equivalence</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>in short</td>
    <td>Exp.Level-of-detail.Arg1-as-detail</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>instead</td>
    <td>Exp.Substitution.Arg2-as-subst</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>meanwhile</td>
    <td>Temp.Synchronous</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>moreover</td>
    <td>Exp.Conjunction</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>nevertheless</td>
    <td>Comp.Concession.Arg2-as-denier</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>nonetheless</td>
    <td>Comp.Concession.Arg2-as-denier</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>on the other hand</td>
    <td>Comp.Contrast</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>once</td>
    <td>Temp.Asynchronous.Succession</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>or</td>
    <td>Exp.Disjunction</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>other than that</td>
    <td>Exp.Exception.Arg1-as-excpt</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>otherwise</td>
    <td>Exp.Exception.Arg1-as-excpt</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>rather than</td>
    <td>Exp.Substitution.Arg1-as-subst</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>similarly</td>
    <td>Comp.Similarity</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>so</td>
    <td>Cont.Cause.Result</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>so that</td>
    <td>Cont.Purpose.Arg2-as-goal</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>specifically</td>
    <td>Exp.Level-of-detail.Arg2-as-detail</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>thereby</td>
    <td>Exp.Manner.Arg1-as-manner</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>therefore</td>
    <td>Cont.Cause.Result</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>then</td>
    <td>Temp.Asynchronous.Precedence</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>this illustrates that</td>
    <td>Exp.Instantiation.Arg1-as-instance</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>though</td>
    <td>Comp.Concession.Arg1-as-denier</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>thus</td>
    <td>Cont.Cause.Result</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>unless</td>
    <td>Cont.Neg-condition.Arg2-as-negCond</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>until</td>
    <td>Temp.Asynchronous.Precedence</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>when</td>
    <td>Temp.Synchronous</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>while</td>
    <td>Temp.Synchronous</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Table 16: Connectives and the main relation senses they signal
K  Appendix: Relation Co-Occurrence Matrix

<table>
  <tr>
    <th></th>
    <th>Arg1-as-except</th>
    <th>Arg1-as-instance</th>
    <th>Arg2-as-cond</th>
    <th>Arg2-as-denier</th>
    <th>Arg2-as-instance</th>
    <th>Arg2-as-subst</th>
    <th>Conjunction</th>
    <th>Contrast</th>
    <th>Disjunction</th>
    <th>Equivalence</th>
    <th>Precedence</th>
    <th>Reason</th>
    <th>Result</th>
    <th>Similarity</th>
    <th>Synchronous</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Arg1-as-except</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>6</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>7</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>10</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>8</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>12</td>
    <td>28</td>
    <td>12</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>44</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>11</td>
    <td>30</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>29</td>
    <td>0</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Arg1-as-instance</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>5</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>15</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>8</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>17</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>12</td>
    <td>28</td>
    <td>12</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>44</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>11</td>
    <td>30</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>29</td>
    <td>0</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Arg2-as-cond</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>28</td>
    <td>19</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>10</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>17</td>
    <td>16</td>
    <td>5</td>
    <td>36</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Arg2-as-denier</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>19</td>
    <td>5</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>5</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>6</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Arg2-as-instance</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>5</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>5</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Arg2-as-subst</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Conjunction</td>
    <td>7</td>
    <td>15</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>28</td>
    <td>19</td>
    <td>5</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Contrast</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Disjunction</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Equivalence</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>11</td>
    <td>8</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>14</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Precedence</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>10</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>35</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>6</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Reason</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Result</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>10</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>17</td>
    <td>16</td>
    <td>5</td>
    <td>36</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>17</td>
    <td>10</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Similarity</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>Synchronous</td>
    <td>8</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>12</td>
    <td>28</td>
    <td>12</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>44</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>11</td>
    <td>30</td>
    <td>4</td>
    <td>29</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
    <td>0</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Figure 5: Relation sense co-occurrence matrix (Only the lowest level elements in the sense hierarchy are shown)

Reviewer paper summaries: The paper presents a study of plausibility of explicit discourse connectives (in PDTB notation) for instructional texts in English. Authors manually collect data from wikiHow data source, then generate alternatives for the connectives and finally design and run human annotation process. They also test the ability of LLM to detect whther the connective is plausible or not in the given context.
Summary of strengths: Very detailed background and related work. The problem is well formulated.
The research is mostly accurately designed (but see also Weaknesses).
Some of the limitations of current LLMs are explored.
New dataset is collected.
Summary of weaknesses: After all restrictions and limitations the research focus seems to be very narrow. To sum up: only English, only one discourse framework, only instuctional texts, only non-ambiguous connectives in terms of discourse relations and only non-ambiguous words in terms of being connectives.

Method for generation of plausible alternatives seems to be questionable. Why these particular models were chosen? Why an old single-token MLM was chosen instead of latest multiple-token ones?

Why LLMs were used only in a zero-shot manner? Few-shot usage can improve results.
Comments, suggestions and typos: Please, check the weaknesses 2 and 3. I suggest to explain these points.
Overall assessment scores: 3.5
Metareview score: 3
Metareview: This paper investigates discourse connectives by examining text revisions with connective insertions on wikihow. 
For a subset of 250 cases, the paper also automatically generates plausible alternative connectives followed by human judgments. 
LLMs were tested to identify instances with multiple plausible relations, and results show that LLMs are unreliable in scenarios with multiple plausible relations.
Summary of reasons to publish: The paper provides detailed background and related work and leverages LLMs to determine whether multiple connectives can coexist or conflict in specific contexts. 
The human judgments on LM-generated alternative connectives provide valuable resources for disambiguating connectives and discourse relations. 

The authors' rebuttal also addresses concerns raised by the reviewers:
- their focus on instructional texts  (wikihow);
- Reason to use 5-scale scores (more fine-grained) and majority voting (higher agreement);
- choice of PDTB framework rather than SDRT: local coherence and focus on connectives;
- detailed annotation instructions to crowd workers in the connective plausibility judgment task;
- how LLMs deal with multiple possible connectives;
- preliminary results on additional few-shot experiments that would be included in the revised version.