The strength with which a statement is made can have a significant impact on
the audience. For example, international relations can be strained by how the
media in one country describes an event in another; and papers can be rejected
because they overstate or understate their findings. It is thus important to
understand the effects of statement strength. A first step is to be able to
distinguish between strong and weak statements. However, even this problem is
understudied, partly due to a lack of data. Since strength is inherently
relative, revisions of texts that make claims are a natural source of data on
strength differences. In this paper, we introduce a corpus of sentence-level
revisions from academic writing. We also describe insights gained from our
annotation efforts for this task.Comment: 6 pages, to appear in Proceedings of ACL 2014 (short paper
