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

TL;DR

This paper introduces WiCoPaCo, a new corpus derived from Wikipedia revisions, capturing natural corrections and paraphrases, useful for training, evaluating NLP systems, and linguistic research.

Contribution

It presents a novel large-scale resource from Wikipedia revision history, detailing its construction and initial application to French language data.

Findings

WiCoPaCo contains numerous correction and paraphrase instances.

Initial experiments demonstrate its usefulness for NLP tasks.

The resource supports linguistic analysis of natural language variations.

Abstract

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.