Information-Theoretic and Prompt-Based Evaluation of Discourse Connective Edits in Instructional Text Revisions

AbstractWe present a dataset of text revisions involving the deletion or replacement of discourse connectives. Manual annotation of a replacement subset reveals that only 19% of edits were judged either necessary or should be left unchanged, with the rest appearing optional. Surprisal metrics from GPT-2 token probabilities and prompt-based predictions from GPT-4.1 correlate with these judgments, particularly in such clear cases.