Sentence-level Rewriting Detection

Writers usually need iterations of revisions and edits during their writings. To better understand the process of rewriting, we need to know what has changed between the revisions. Prior work mainly focuses on detecting corrections within sentences, which is at the level of words or phrases. This paper proposes to detect revision changes at the sentence level. Looking at revisions at a higher level allows us to have a different understanding of the revision process. This paper also proposes an approach to automatically detect sentence revision changes. The proposed approach shows high accuracy in an evaluation using first and final draft essays from an undergraduate writing class.