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.
A well-recognized limitation of research on supervised sentence compression is the dearth of available training data. We propose a new and bountiful resource for such training data, which we obtain by mining the revision history of Wikipedia for sentence compressions and expansions. Using only a fraction of the available Wikipedia data, we have collected a training corpus of over 380,000 sentence pairs, two orders of magnitude larger than the standardly used Ziff-Davis corpus. Using this new-found data, we propose a novel lexicalized noisy channel model for sentence compression, achieving improved results in grammaticality and compression rate criteria with a slight decrease in importance. The strength with which a statement is made can have a significant impact on the audience. For example, international relations can be strained by how the media in one country describes an event in another; and papers can be rejected because they overstate or understate their findings. It is thus important to understand the effects of statement strength. A first step is to be able to distinguish between strong and weak statements. However, even this problem is understudied, partly due to a lack of data. Since strength is inherently relative, revisions of texts that make claims are a natural source of data on strength differences. In this paper, we introduce a corpus of sentence-level revisions from academic writing. We also describe insights gained from our annotation efforts for this task. Social media sites are often guided by a core group of committed users engaged in various forms of governance. A crucial aspect of this type of governance is deliberation, in which such a group reaches decisions on issues of importance to the site. Despite its crucial — though subtle — role in how a number of prominent social media sites function, there has been relatively little investigation of the deliberative aspects of social media governance. Here we explore this issue, investigating a particular deliberative process that is extensive, public, and recorded: the promotion of Wikipedia admins, which is determined by elections that engage committed members of the Wikipedia community. We find that the group decision-making at the heart of this process exhibits several fundamental forms of relative assessment. First we observe that the chance that a voter will support a candidate is strongly dependent on the relationship between characteristics of the voter and the candidate. Second we investigate how both individual voter decisions and overall election outcomes can be based on models that take into account the sequential, public nature of the voting. 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  In this paper we propose a novel method to automatically extract large textual entailment datasets homogeneous to existing ones. The key idea is the combination of two intuitions: (1) the use of Wikipedia to extract a large set of textual entailment pairs; (2) the application of semisupervised machine learning methods to make the extracted dataset homogeneous to the existing ones. We report empirical evidence that our method successfully expands existing textual entailment corpora. Recent work on Textual Entailment has shown a crucial role of knowledge to support entailment inferences. However, it has also been demonstrated that currently available entailment rules are still far from being optimal. We propose a methodology for the automatic acquisition of large scale context-rich entailment rules from Wikipedia revisions, taking advantage of the syntactic structure of entailment pairs to define the more appropriate linguistic constraints for the rule to be successfully applicable. We report on rule acquisition experiments on Wikipedia, showing that it enables the creation of an innovative (i.e. acquired rules are not present in other available resources) and good quality rule repository.  We show that existing methods for training preposition error correction systems, whether using well-edited text or error-annotated corpora, do not generalize across very different test sets. We present a new, large errorannotated corpus and use it to train systems that generalize across three different test sets, each from a different domain and with different error characteristics. This new corpus is automatically extracted from Wikipedia revisions and contains over one million instances of preposition corrections. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia which anyone can edit. While most edits are constructive, about 7 are acts of vandalism. Such behavior is characterized by modifications made in bad faith; introducing spam and other inappropriate content. In this work, we present the results of an effort to integrate three of the leading approaches to Wikipedia vandalism detection: a spatio-temporal analysis of metadata (STiki), a reputation-based system (WikiTrust), and natural language processing features. The performance of the resulting joint system improves the state-of-the-art from all previous methods and establishes a new baseline for Wikipedia vandalism detection. We examine in detail the contribution of the three approaches, both for the task of discovering fresh vandalism, and for the task of locating vandalism in the complete set of Wikipedia revisions. We report on work in progress on extracting lexical simplifications (e.g., "collaborate" → "work together"), focusing on utilizing edit histories in Simple English Wikipedia for this task. We consider two main approaches: (1) deriving simplification probabilities via an edit model that accounts for a mixture of different operations, and (2) using metadata to focus on edits that are more likely to be simplification operations. We find our methods to outperform a reasonable baseline and yield many high-quality lexical simplifications not included in an independently-created manually prepared list. 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. This paper introduces the freely available WikEd Error Corpus. We describe the data mining process from Wikipedia revision histories, corpus content and format. The corpus consists of more than 12 million sentences with a total of 14 million edits of various types. As one possible application, we show that WikEd can be successfully adapted to improve a strong baseline in a task of grammatical error correction for English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) learners’ writings by 2.63 . Used together with an ESL error corpus, a composed system gains 1.64 when compared to the ESL-trained system. Naturally-occurring instances of linguistic phenomena are important both for training and for evaluating automatic text processing. When available in large quantities, they also prove interesting material for linguistic studies. In this article, we present WiCoPaCo (Wikipedia Correction and Paraphrase Corpus), a new freely-available resource built by automatically mining Wikipedia’s revision history. The WiCoPaCo corpus focuses on local modifications made by human revisors and include various types of corrections (such as spelling error or typographical corrections) and rewritings, which can be categorized broadly into meaning-preserving and meaning-altering revisions. We present an initial hand-built typology of these revisions, but the resource allows for any possible annotation scheme. We discuss the main motivations for building such a resource and describe the main technical details guiding its construction. We also present applications and data analysis on French and report initial results on spelling error correction and morphosyntactic rewriting. The WiCoPaCo corpus can be freely downloaded from http: wicopaco.limsi.fr.