# arXivEdits: Understanding the Human Revision Process in Scientific Writing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15067 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15067/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [SpanBERT: Improving Pre-training by Representing and Predicting Spans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10529/) (2019)
- [A Discourse-Aware Attention Model for Abstractive Summarization of Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05685/) (2018)
- [Reformulating Unsupervised Style Transfer as Paraphrase Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05700/) (2020)
- [A Dataset of Peer Reviews (PeerRead): Collection, Insights and NLP Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09635/) (2018)
- [Neural CRF Model for Sentence Alignment in Text Simplification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02324/) (2020)
- [Automatically Neutralizing Subjective Bias in Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09709/) (2019)
- [Understanding Iterative Revision from Human-Written Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03802/) (2022)
- [A Frustratingly Easy Approach for Entity and Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12812/) (2020)
- [Extending a Parser to Distant Domains Using a Few Dozen Partially Annotated Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06556/) (2018)
- [DebateSum: A large-scale argument mining and summarization dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07251/) (2020)
- [Text Editing by Command](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12826/) (2020)
- [ParaSCI: A Large Scientific Paraphrase Dataset for Longer Paraphrase Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08382/) (2021)
- [A Supervised Word Alignment Method based on Cross-Language Span Prediction using Multilingual BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14516/) (2020)
- [WikiAtomicEdits: A Multilingual Corpus of Wikipedia Edits for Modeling Language and Discourse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09422/) (2018)
- [Towards Automated Document Revision: Grammatical Error Correction, Fluency Edits, and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11484/) (2022)
- [Neural semi-Markov CRF for Monolingual Word Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02569/) (2021)
- [A Corpus of Sentence-level Revisions in Academic Writing: A Step towards Understanding Statement Strength in Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.1439/) (2014)
- [ArgRewrite V.2: an Annotated Argumentative Revisions Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01677/) (2022)
- [Improving Large-scale Paraphrase Acquisition and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03235/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [A Design Space for Intelligent and Interactive Writing Assistants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14117/) (2024)
- [Can AI writing be salvaged? Mitigating Idiosyncrasies and Improving Human-AI Alignment in the Writing Process through Edits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14509/) (2024)
- [ARIES: A Corpus of Scientific Paper Edits Made in Response to Peer Reviews](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12587/) (2023)
- [What Can Natural Language Processing Do for Peer Review?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06563/) (2024)
- [Multi-News+: Cost-efficient Dataset Cleansing via LLM-based Data Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09682/) (2024)
- [CASIMIR: A Corpus of Scientific Articles enhanced with Multiple Author-Integrated Revisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00241/) (2024)
- [SWiPE: A Dataset for Document-Level Simplification of Wikipedia Pages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19204/) (2023)
- [Re3: A Holistic Framework and Dataset for Modeling Collaborative Document Revision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00197/) (2024)
- [Are Large Language Models Good Classifiers? A Study on Edit Intent Classification in Scientific Document Revisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02028/) (2024)
- [ScholaWrite: A Dataset of End-to-End Scholarly Writing Process](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02904/) (2025)
- [Thresh: A Unified, Customizable and Deployable Platform for Fine-Grained Text Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06953/) (2023)
- [Can AI Be a Good Peer Reviewer? A Survey of Peer Review Process, Evaluation, and the Future](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27924/) (2026)
- [Text revision in Scientific Writing Assistance: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16726/) (2023)
- [Automatic and Human-AI Interactive Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03878/) (2023)
- [Efficient Layer-wise LLM Fine-tuning for Revision Intention Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.00268/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models for History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science: Interpretive Uses, Methodological Challenges, and Critical Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12242/) (2025)
- [EarlySciRev: A Dataset of Early-Stage Scientific Revisions Extracted from LaTeX Writing Traces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28515/) (2026)
- [IntentGrasp: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Intent Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06832/) (2026)
- [GVD: Governed Versioning and Deduplication for Document Repositories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17696/) (2026)
- [WikiIns: A High-Quality Dataset for Controlled Text Editing by Natural Language Instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05009/) (2023)
- [Principled Fine-tuning of LLMs from User-Edits: A Medley of Preference, Supervision, and Reward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19055/) (2026)
- [Intention-Adaptive LLM Fine-Tuning for Text Revision Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00477/) (2026)
- [Teaching LLMs Human-Like Editing of Inappropriate Argumentation via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12770/) (2026)
- [WikiSTAR: A System for Shedding Light on the Hidden History of Scientific Wikipedia Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12441/) (2026)
- [Metag: A dataset to build agentic meta-reviewing capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20488/) (2026)
- [From Granular Revision Operations to Meaningful Revision Units: Evaluating LLMs for Revision Boundary Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33720/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scientific publications are the primary means to communicate research discoveries, where the writing quality is of crucial importance. However, prior work studying the human editing process in this domain mainly focused on the abstract or introduction sections, resulting in an incomplete picture. In this work, we provide a complete computational framework for studying text revision in scientific writing. We first introduce arXivEdits, a new annotated corpus of 751 full papers from arXiv with gold sentence alignment across their multiple versions of revision, as well as fine-grained span-level edits and their underlying intentions for 1,000 sentence pairs. It supports our data-driven analysis to unveil the common strategies practiced by researchers for revising their papers. To scale up the analysis, we also develop automatic methods to extract revision at document-, sentence-, and word-levels. A neural CRF sentence alignment model trained on our corpus achieves 93.8 F1, enabling the reliable matching of sentences between different versions. We formulate the edit extraction task as a span alignment problem, and our proposed method extracts more fine-grained and explainable edits, compared to the commonly used diff algorithm. An intention classifier trained on our dataset achieves 78.9 F1 on the fine-grained intent classification task. Our data and system are released at tiny.one/arxivedits.