Optimizing the phrasing of argumentative text is crucial in higher education and professional development. However, assessing whether and how the different claims in a text should be revised is a hard task, especially for novice writers. In this work, we explore the main challenges to identifying argumentative claims in need of specific revisions. By learning from collaborative editing behaviors in online debates, we seek to capture implicit revision patterns in order to develop approaches aimed at guiding writers in how to further improve their arguments. We systematically compare the ability of common word embedding models to capture the differences between different versions of the same text, and we analyze their impact on various types of writing issues. To deal with the noisy nature of revision-based corpora, we propose a new sampling strategy based on revision distance. Opposed to approaches from prior work, such sampling can be done without employing additional annotations and judgments. Moreover, we provide evidence that using contextual information and domain knowledge can further improve prediction results. How useful a certain type of context is, depends on the issue the claim is suffering from, though.

Assessing the quality of arguments and of the claims the arguments are composed of has become a key task in computational argumentation. However, even if different claims share the same stance on the same topic, their assessment depends on the prior perception and weighting of the different aspects of the topic being discussed. This renders it difficult to learn topic-independent quality indicators. In this paper, we study claim quality assessment irrespective of discussed aspects by comparing different revisions of the same claim. We compile a large-scale corpus with over 377k claim revision pairs of various types from kialo.com, covering diverse topics from politics, ethics, entertainment, and others. We then propose two tasks: (a) assessing which claim of a revision pair is better, and (b) ranking all versions of a claim by quality. Our first experiments with embedding-based logistic regression and transformer-based neural networks show promising results, suggesting that learned indicators generalize well across topics. In a detailed error analysis, we give insights into what quality dimensions of claims can be assessed reliably. We provide the data and scripts needed to reproduce all results.