From Granular Revision Operations to Meaningful Revision Units: Evaluating LLMs for Revision Boundary Detection

Abstract

Revision traces provide valuable evidence about students'writing processes, but their usefulness for learning analytics depends on how individual revisions are represented. Automated draft-comparison methods often produce granular edit operations that can fragment a single purposeful revision into multiple analytic units. This study evaluates whether LLMs can identify meaningful revision unit boundaries in structured revision operation data and whether they provide value beyond simple non-LLM baselines. Using 113 matched draft--revision pairs from undergraduate writing, expert annotation yielded 4,344 candidate boundaries. We compared zero- and few-shot GPT-5.5 and base Qwen3-32B, parameter-efficient fine-tuning of Qwen3-32B, and majority and proximity-based baselines. Despite receiving revision context and task instructions, no prompted LLM condition outperformed the proximity heuristic (macro-F1 = .825). In contrast, fine-tuned Qwen3-32B using the two context representation achieved the highest macro-F1 (.859), identifying more same-unit relationships while maintaining precision comparable to the heuristic. Deterministic post-processing substantially improved the prompted models but added little benefit to the strongest fine-tuned model. These findings suggest that LLMs can support revision boundary judgment when task-adapted, but general purpose prompting alone may not outperform transparent structural heuristics.