Rebuttal Guidance

Overview

This skill delivers executable rebuttal guidance per concern: structured plans, evidence pointers, tone and strategy priorities. It does not produce ready-to-paste rebuttal prose; the author writes the final text.

The core model is conditional persuasion P(Z=1 | X, Y):

• X: reviewer mindset (behavior cluster inferred from review text)
• Y: rebuttal strategy vector (which tactics to emphasize)
• Z: success (score increase or paper accepted)

When to use

• User pastes Weaknesses / Questions from ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, EMNLP, etc.
• User asks how to respond to a specific reviewer comment.
• User wants a structured plan before writing rebuttal prose.
• User asks which tone or evidence strategy fits a harsh vs. open reviewer.
• User says "reviewer ignored my rebuttal" and wants to recalibrate.

When NOT to use

• User wants full rebuttal text copied verbatim → output guidance first; warn against blind LLM paste.
• User asks to evaluate a research idea → use idea-evaluator.
• User asks for pre-submission paper review → use pre-submission-reviewer.
• No review text provided → ask for it first.

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Core procedure

Step 1: Inventory concerns

Extract every numbered Weakness and Question from the pasted review. If the user pasted only one reviewer's block, ask whether other reviewers exist.

Output a short table:

ID	Type	One-line summary
R1.W1	W	...
R1.Q1	Q	...

Step 2: Classify each concern

See: references/concern-classification.md

Tag each item as one of: misunderstanding | evidence_gap | novelty | baseline_fairness | scope_claim | writing_clarity | theory | efficiency | other

Step 3: Match reviewer mindset (X)

See: references/mindset-matching-heuristics.md