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A Survey of NLP Methods and Resources for Analyzing the Collaborative Writing Process in Wikipedia

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The People’s Web Meets NLP

Abstract

With the rise of the Web 2.0, participatory and collaborative content production have largely replaced the traditional ways of information sharing and have created the novel genre of collaboratively constructed language resources. A vast untapped potential lies in the dynamic aspects of these resources, which cannot be unleashed with traditional methods designed for static corpora. In this chapter, we focus on Wikipedia as the most prominent instance of collaboratively constructed language resources. In particular, we discuss the significance of Wikipedi’s revision history for applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the unique prospects of the user discussions, a new resource that has just begun to be mined. While the body of research on processing Wikipedia’s revision history is dominated by works that use the revision data as the basis for practical applications such as spelling correction or vandalism detection, most of the work focused on user discussions uses NLP for analyzing and understanding the data itself.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://etherpad.org/

  2. 2.

    https://docs.google.com

  3. 3.

    https://writer.zoho.com

  4. 4.

    http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/booktype/

  5. 5.

    However, pages can be protected from editing by privileged users, as stated in the Wikipedia Protection Policy, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Protection_policy.

  6. 6.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:UNDO

  7. 7.

    http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/

  8. 8.

    Freely accessible at http://code.google.com/p/dkpro-spelling-asl/.

  9. 9.

    See http://wicopaco.limsi.fr/.

  10. 10.

    The Simple Wikipedia author Specerk offers a list of transformation pairs: http://simple.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Spencerk/list_of_straight-up_substitutables.

  11. 11.

    See http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/llee/data/simple/.

  12. 12.

    See http://art.uniroma2.it/zanzotto/.

  13. 13.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:FA_Criteria

  14. 14.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Manual_of_Style

  15. 15.

    WikiProject article quality grading scheme: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Assessment.

  16. 16.

    From http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Vandalism&oldid=489137966. The same page also offers a list of frequent types of vandalism.

  17. 17.

    Cf. a list of Anti-vandalism bots compiled by the author Emijrp: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Emijrp/Anti-vandalism_bot_census&oldid=482285684.

  18. 18.

    See http://www.webis.de/research/corpora/pan-wvc-10 and http://www.uni-weimar.de/cms/medien/webis/research/corpora/pan-wvc-11.html.

  19. 19.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SIGNATURE

  20. 20.

    http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads

  21. 21.

    http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor

  22. 22.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:ARCHIVE

  23. 23.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:TTALK

  24. 24.

    According to [35], “[t]he sample was chosen to include a variety of controversial and non-controversial topics and span a spectrum from hard science to pop culture.”

  25. 25.

    http://hadoop.apache.org/

  26. 26.

    The corpus was split into training set (67 %), development set (17 %) and test set (16 %).

  27. 27.

    A troll is a participant in online discussions with the primary goal of posting disruptive, off-topic messages or provoking emotional responses.

  28. 28.

    A compilation of these can be found under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:WikiProject_User_scripts/Scripts

  29. 29.

    http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API

  30. 30.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php

  31. 31.

    http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Client_code

  32. 32.

    http://toolserver.org/

  33. 33.

    http://dumps.wikimedia.org/

  34. 34.

    http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps#Tools

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the Volkswagen Foundation as part of the Lichtenberg-Professorship Program under grant No. I/82806, and by the Hessian research excellence program “Landes-Offensive zur Entwicklung Wissenschaftlich-ökonomischer Exzellenz” (LOEWE) as part of the research center “Digital Humanities”. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

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  1. Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Oliver Ferschke & Johannes Daxenberger

  2. Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab, Technische Universität Darmstadt, German Institute for Educational Research and Educational Information, Darmstadt, Germany

    Iryna Gurevych

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  1. Oliver Ferschke
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Correspondence to Oliver Ferschke .

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  1. Department of Computer Science Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Iryna Gurevych  & Jungi Kim  & 

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Ferschke, O., Daxenberger, J., Gurevych, I. (2013). A Survey of NLP Methods and Resources for Analyzing the Collaborative Writing Process in Wikipedia. In: Gurevych, I., Kim, J. (eds) The People’s Web Meets NLP. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35085-6_5

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