We release a corpus of 43 million atomic edits across 8 languages. These edits are mined from Wikipedia edit history and consist of instances in which a human editor has inserted a single contiguous phrase into, or deleted a single contiguous phrase from, an existing sentence. We use the collected data to show that the language generated during editing differs from the language that we observe in standard corpora, and that models trained on edits encode different aspects of semantics and discourse than models trained on raw, unstructured text. We release the full corpus as a resource to aid ongoing research in semantics, discourse, and representation learning.
Wikipedia edit history has been used as a source of supervision for a variety of NLP tasks, including sentence compression and simplification @cite_30 @cite_13 , paraphrasing @cite_11 , entailment @cite_9 @cite_1 , and writing assistance @cite_3 @cite_0 @cite_20 . User edits from Wikipedia and elsewhere have also been analyzed extensively for insight into the editing process and the types of edits made @cite_8 @cite_25 @cite_10 and to better understand argumentation @cite_35 . Particular attention has been given to spam edits @cite_12 and editor quality @cite_18 . Our work differs in that WikiAtomicEdits is much larger than currently available corpora, both by number of languages and by size of individual languages. In addition, our focus on atomic edits should facilitate more controlled studies of semantics and discourse.
@cite_30 @cite_35 @cite_18 @cite_8 @cite_10 @cite_9 @cite_1 @cite_3 @cite_0 @cite_12 @cite_13 @cite_25 @cite_20 @cite_11
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We present an open-source toolkit which allows (i) to reconstruct past states of Wikipedia, and (ii) to efficiently access the edit history of Wikipedia articles. Reconstructing past states of Wikipedia is a prerequisite for reproducing previous experimental work based on Wikipedia. Beyond that, the edit history of Wikipedia articles has been shown to be a valuable knowledge source for NLP, but access is severely impeded by the lack of efficient tools for managing the huge amount of provided data. By using a dedicated storage format, our toolkit massively decreases the data volume to less than 2 of the original size, and at the same time provides an easy-to-use interface to access the revision data. The language-independent design allows to process any language represented in Wikipedia. We expect this work to consolidate NLP research using Wikipedia in general, and to foster research making use of the knowledge encoded in Wikipedia's edit history. In this paper, we analyze a novel set of features for the task of automatic edit category classification. Edit category classification assigns categories such as spelling error correction, paraphrase or vandalism to edits in a document. Our features are based on differences between two versions of a document including meta data, textual and language properties and markup. In a supervised machine learning experiment, we achieve a micro-averaged F1 score of .62 on a corpus of edits from the English Wikipedia. In this corpus, each edit has been multi-labeled according to a 21-category taxonomy. A model trained on the same data achieves state-of-the-art performance on the related task of fluency edit classification. We apply pattern mining to automatically labeled edits in the revision histories of different Wikipedia articles. Our results suggest that high-quality articles show a higher degree of homogeneity with respect to their collaboration patterns as compared to random articles. In this paper, we present a study of the collaborative writing process in Wikipedia. Our work is based on a corpus of 1,995 edits obtained from 891 article revisions in the English Wikipedia. We propose a 21-category classification scheme for edits based on Faigley and Witte’s (1981) model. Example edit categories include spelling error corrections and vandalism. In a manual multi-label annotation study with 3 annotators, we obtain an inter-annotator agreement of = 0.67. We further analyze the distribution of edit categories for distinct stages in the revision history of 10 featured and 10 non-featured articles. Our results show that the information content in featured articles tends to become more stable after their promotion. On the opposite, this is not true for non-featured articles. We make the resulting corpus and the annotation guidelines freely available. 1 Whether knowingly or otherwise, Wikipedia contributors reveal their interests and expertise through their contribution patterns. An analysis of Wikipedia edit histories shows that it is often possible to associate contributors with relatively small geographic regions, usually corresponding to where they were born or where they presently live. For many contributors, the geographic coordinates of pages they have edited are tightly clustered. Results suggest that a wealth of information about contributors can be gleaned from edit histories. This illustrates the efficacy of data mining on large, publicly-available datasets and raises potential privacy concerns.