NewsEdits: A News Article Revision Dataset and a Novel Document-Level Reasoning Challenge

Alexander Spangher, Xiang Ren, Jonathan May, Nanyun Peng


Abstract
News article revision histories provide clues to narrative and factual evolution in news articles. To facilitate analysis of this evolution, we present the first publicly available dataset of news revision histories, NewsEdits. Our dataset is large-scale and multilingual; it contains 1.2 million articles with 4.6 million versions from over 22 English- and French-language newspaper sources based in three countries, spanning 15 years of coverage (2006-2021).We define article-level edit actions: Addition, Deletion, Edit and Refactor, and develop a high-accuracy extraction algorithm to identify these actions. To underscore the factual nature of many edit actions, we conduct analyses showing that added and deleted sentences are more likely to contain updating events, main content and quotes than unchanged sentences. Finally, to explore whether edit actions are predictable, we introduce three novel tasks aimed at predicting actions performed during version updates. We show that these tasks are possible for expert humans but are challenging for large NLP models. We hope this can spur research in narrative framing and help provide predictive tools for journalists chasing breaking news.
Anthology ID:
2022.naacl-main.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, United States
Editors:
Marine Carpuat, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Ivan Vladimir Meza Ruiz
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
127–157
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.10
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.naacl-main.10
Award:
 Honorable mention for contributions to resources
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alexander Spangher, Xiang Ren, Jonathan May, and Nanyun Peng. 2022. NewsEdits: A News Article Revision Dataset and a Novel Document-Level Reasoning Challenge. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 127–157, Seattle, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NewsEdits: A News Article Revision Dataset and a Novel Document-Level Reasoning Challenge (Spangher et al., NAACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.10.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.naacl-main.10.mp4
Code
 isi-nlp/newsedits