Mining Naturally-occurring Corrections and Paraphrases from Wikipedia's Revision History

Naturally-occurring instances of linguistic phenomena are important both for training and for evaluating automatic processes on text. When available in large quantities, they also prove interesting material for linguistic studies. In this article, we present a new resource built from Wikipedia's revision history, called WiCoPaCo (Wikipedia Correction and Paraphrase Corpus), which contains numerous editings by human contributors, including various corrections and rewritings. We discuss the main motivations for building such a resource, describe how it was built and present initial applications on French.