WikiAtomicEdits: A Multilingual Corpus of Wikipedia Edits for Modeling Language and Discourse

Abstract: We release a corpus of 43 million atomic edits across 8 languages. These edits are mined from Wikipedia edit history and consist of instances in which a human editor has inserted a single contiguous phrase into, or deleted a single contiguous phrase from, an existing sentence. We use the collected data to show that the language generated during editing differs from the language that we observe in standard corpora, and that models trained on edits encode different aspects of semantics and discourse than models trained on raw, unstructured text. We release the full corpus as a resource to aid ongoing research in semantics, discourse, and representation learning.