  Academic writing should be concise as concise sentences better keep the
readers' attention and convey meaning clearly. Writing concisely is
challenging, for writers often struggle to revise their drafts. We introduce
and formulate revising for concision as a natural language processing task at
the sentence level. Revising for concision requires algorithms to use only
necessary words to rewrite a sentence while preserving its meaning. The revised
sentence should be evaluated according to its word choice, sentence structure,
and organization. The revised sentence also needs to fulfil semantic retention
and syntactic soundness. To aide these efforts, we curate and make available a
benchmark parallel dataset that can depict revising for concision. The dataset
contains 536 pairs of sentences before and after revising, and all pairs are
collected from college writing centres. We also present and evaluate the
approaches to this problem, which may assist researchers in this area.
