Julien Aubert-Béduchaud

Léane Jourdan, Julien Aubert-Béduchaud, Yannis Chupin et al.

Scientific writing is an iterative process that generates rich revision traces, yet publicly available resources typically expose only final or near-final versions of papers. This limits empirical study of revision behaviour and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) for scientific writing. We introduce EarlySciRev, a dataset of early-stage scientific text revisions automatically extracted from arXiv LaTeX source files. Our key observation is that commented-out text in LaTeX often preserves discarded or alternative formulations written by the authors themselves. By aligning commented segments with nearby final text, we extract paragraph-level candidate revision pairs and apply LLM-based filtering to retain genuine revisions. Starting from 1.28M candidate pairs, our pipeline yields 578k validated revision pairs, grounded in authentic early drafting traces. We additionally provide a human-annotated benchmark for revision detection. EarlySciRev complements existing resources focused on late-stage revisions or synthetic rewrites and supports research on scientific writing dynamics, revision modelling, and LLM-assisted editing.

Julien Aubert-Béduchaud, Florian Boudin, Béatrice Daille et al.

Familiarizing oneself with a new scientific field and its existing literature can be daunting due to the large amount of available articles. Curated lists of academic references, or reading lists, compiled by experts, offer a structured way to gain a comprehensive overview of a domain or a specific scientific challenge. In this work, we introduce ACL-rlg, the largest open expert-annotated reading list dataset. We also provide multiple baselines for evaluating reading list generation and formally define it as a retrieval task. Our qualitative study highlights the fact that traditional scholarly search engines and indexing methods perform poorly on this task, and GPT-4o, despite showing better results, exhibits signs of potential data contamination.