Reformulating Discourse Connectives for Non-Expert Readers

In this paper we report a behavioural experiment documenting that different lexicosyntactic formulations of the discourse relation of causation are deemed more or less acceptable by different categories of readers. We further report promising results for automatically selecting the formulation that is most appropriate for a given category of reader using supervised learning. This investigation is embedded within a longer term research agenda aimed at summarising scientific writing for lay readers using appropriate paraphrasing.