Revision is a crucial step in scientific writing, where authors refine their work to improve clarity, structure, and academic quality. Existing approaches to automated writing assistance often focus on sentence-level revisions, which fail to capture the broader context needed for effective modification. In this paper, we explore the impact of shifting from sentence-level to paragraph-level scope for the task of scientific text revision. The paragraph level definition of the task allows for more meaningful changes, and is guided by detailed revision instructions rather than general ones. To support this task, we introduce ParaRev, the first dataset of revised scientific paragraphs with an evaluation subset manually annotated with revision instructions. Our experiments demonstrate that using detailed instructions significantly improves the quality of automated revisions compared to general approaches, no matter the model or the metric considered.

Writing a scientific article is a challenging task as it is a highly codified and specific genre, consequently proficiency in written communication is essential for effectively conveying research findings and ideas. In this article, we propose an original textual resource on the revision step of the writing process of scientific articles. This new dataset, called CASIMIR, contains the multiple revised versions of 15,646 scientific articles from OpenReview, along with their peer reviews. Pairs of consecutive versions of an article are aligned at sentence-level while keeping paragraph location information as metadata for supporting future revision studies at the discourse level. Each pair of revised sentences is enriched with automatically extracted edits and associated revision intention. To assess the initial quality on the dataset, we conducted a qualitative study of several state-of-the-art text revision approaches and compared various evaluation metrics. Our experiments led us to question the relevance of the current evaluation methods for the text revision task.

Écrire un article scientifique est une tâche difficile. L’écriture scientifique étant un genre très codifié, de bonnes compétences d’écriture sont essentielles pour transmettre ses idées et les résultats de ses recherches. Cet article décrit les motivations et les travaux préliminaires de la création du corpus CASIMIR dont l’objectif est d’offrir une ressource sur l’étape de révision du processus d’écriture d’un article scientifique. CASIMIR est un corpus des multiples versions de 26 355 articles scientifiques provenant d’OpenReview accompagné des relectures par les pairs.