A Definition of "Version" for Text Production Data and Natural Language Document Drafts

Cerstin Mahlow

Abstract: Research on differencing and versioning in computer science, writing research, and scholarly editing are all concerned with the evolution of texts and documents through various drafts, versions, and changes between different stages. While the different disciplines all have their own perspectives, on closer inspection, there is a large overlap of concerns. However, there are currently no points of contacts between these disciplines. In this vision paper, we propose a working definition of "version" to reconcile the different views and open the way to closer collaboration. In particular, we propose to model the semantics of changes in what seems to be unstructured text as differences between syntactic parse trees.