EarlySciRev: A Dataset of Early-Stage Scientific Revisions Extracted from LaTeX Writing Traces

Léane Jourdan, Julien Aubert-Béduchaud, Yannis Chupin, Marah Baccari, Florian Boudin


Abstract
Scientific writing is an iterative process that generates rich revision traces, yet publicly available resources typically expose only final or near-final versions of papers. This limits empirical study of revision behaviour and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) for scientific writing. We introduce EarlySciRev, a dataset of early-stage scientific text revisions automatically extracted from arXiv LaTeX source files. Our key observation is that commented-out text in LaTeX often preserves discarded or alternative formulations written by the authors themselves. By aligning commented segments with nearby final text, we extract paragraph-level candidate revision pairs and apply LLM-based filtering to retain genuine revisions. Starting from 1.28M candidate pairs, our pipeline yields 578k validated revision pairs, grounded in authentic early drafting traces. We additionally provide a human-annotated benchmark for revision detection. EarlySciRev complements existing resources focused on late-stage revisions or synthetic rewrites and supports research on scientific writing dynamics, revision modelling, and LLM-assisted editing.
Anthology ID:
2026.nslp-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of Natural Scientific Language Processing (NSLP) @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Georg Rehm, Stefan Dietze, Danilo Dessi, Diana Maynard, Sonja Schimmler
Venues:
NSLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
119–126
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-nslp-12
DOI:
10.63317/4fpwcgmuqk8x
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Léane Jourdan, Julien Aubert-Béduchaud, Yannis Chupin, Marah Baccari, and Florian Boudin. 2026. EarlySciRev: A Dataset of Early-Stage Scientific Revisions Extracted from LaTeX Writing Traces. In Proceedings of Natural Scientific Language Processing (NSLP) @ LREC 2026, pages 119–126, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
EarlySciRev: A Dataset of Early-Stage Scientific Revisions Extracted from LaTeX Writing Traces (Jourdan et al., NSLP 2026)
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