Making Revisions Understandable: A Survey of Edit Intentions, Methods, and Applications

Fangping Lan, Qi Zhang, Eduard Dragut


Abstract
Text revision is a core process in document creation, capturing how authors iteratively refine, reorganize, and improve written content. With the increasing availability of large-scale revision histories from platforms such as Wikipedia and arXiv, NLP research has begun to move beyond modeling what changes are made to understanding why they are made, i.e., the underlying edit intentions. To our knowledge, this is the first survey that synthesizes text revision research through the lens of edit intentions, providing a unified view of datasets, taxonomies, identification methods, and applications. We review prior work across the full revision workflow, including revision corpus construction, edit intention taxonomy design, and edit intention identification. We further categorize representative datasets and methods, summarize downstream applications such as writing assistance and document edit summarization, and highlight key open research directions.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.1747
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
35003–35019
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1747/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fangping Lan, Qi Zhang, and Eduard Dragut. 2026. Making Revisions Understandable: A Survey of Edit Intentions, Methods, and Applications. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 35003–35019, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Making Revisions Understandable: A Survey of Edit Intentions, Methods, and Applications (Lan et al., Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1747.pdf
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