brycewang-stanford ASE Author Response
Use this after ASE reviews are released. ASE has two distinct speaking turns, and conflating them is a common mistake: a short rebuttal (for papers that survive the early-rejection gate), and — if you receive a Revision — a summary-of-changes accompanying a revised paper that is re-checked against the reviewers' explicitly stated criteria. Both must respect double-anonymity: no author names, institutions, or revealed repository ownership, even to strengthen a point.
Triage (both turns)
- Answer what affects the decision: significance and soundness of the automation, evaluation quality on real subjects, threats to validity, clarity, and the Data Availability / artifact posture.
- Use evidence that already exists or that the revision will concretely add — never a vague promise.
- Correct factual misreadings first; a reviewer who misread your tool's configuration or a table is often persuadable.
- Keep every word anonymous. Do not name your tool's real name, institution, grant, or a private repository.
Turn 1 — the rebuttal (only if you survived early rejection)
If your paper reached the rebuttal stage, at least one reviewer saw value; a uniformly negative set would have been early-rejected. So the rebuttal's job is narrow: move the borderline reviewer.
- Short and decision-focused. One decision-critical point per reviewer beats an exhaustive reply.
- Concede what is true, correct what is misread, and point to exactly where the answer lives in the submitted paper or artifact.
- Do not paste large new results the reviewers cannot verify; if a small, checkable number answers a direct question ("what is the runtime overhead?"), give it.
- Signal what you would do in a revision, because Revision is a live outcome — but do not promise a redesign you cannot deliver in the window.
Turn 2 — the revision summary-of-changes (the distinctive ASE move)
A Revision is criteria-bound: the reviewers wrote concrete, actionable criteria and agreed to accept in principle if they are met. The summary-of-changes is a criterion ledger: for every stated criterion, either meet it and show where, or explain precisely why it is infeasible and what you did instead.
[C1] Criterion (quoted): "Add a comparison against tool X on the same subjects."
-> Action: DONE | added §5.3, Table 4: X run with an equal, documented budget on all 90 subjects
-> Where: §5.3, Table 4; artifact/eval/compare_X.sh
[C2] Criterion: "Report an ablation isolating the learned component."
-> Action: DONE | §5.4, Table 5 replaces learned templates with static rewrites
[C3] Criterion: "Evaluate on an industrial code base."
-> Action: INFEASIBLE (with reason) | no license to redistribute proprietary subjects; added
an open large-scale subject instead (§5.5) and noted the residual external-validity threat
The rule that turns a Revision into an acceptance: address every criterion. A criterion that is neither met nor explicitly and reasonably addressed is what the re-check punishes — the discussion lead maps your summary-of-changes back onto the criteria one by one.
Reviewer pushback patterns (automated-SE flavored)
| Pushback | What it signals | ASE-ready response |
|---|---|---|
| "The baseline tool is not tuned/fair" | Soundness doubt about the comparison | Re-run with an equal, documented budget; report new numbers, or justify the setup |
| "Evaluated only on toy or self-selected subjects" | External-validity limit | Add real subject systems, or scope the claim and name the threat |
| "The improvement is the model, not your design" | Model-as-contribution doubt | Add the ablation isolating the automation from the model; report marginal value |
| "The tool/artifact does not run" | Reproducibility / availability gap | Fix and re-anonymize; describe the run path and re-execution oracle in the response |
| "Overlaps prior automation X" | Novelty/delta doubt | Sharpen the delta sentence; add the missing head-to-head comparison |
Anonymity in the response (easy to slip)
- Refer to your own prior work in the third person, as in the paper.
- Describe tool/artifact changes without linking to an identity-revealing repository; use the anonymized location.
- Do not thank a named collaborator or funder inside the response or the summary-of-changes.
Calibration
- Respond to the criterion the reviewer actually raised, not the one you would rather defend.
- Length and format norms for both turns vary by cycle; confirm the current instructions before sending.
- The PC discussion (and, for a Revision, the re-check against the stated criteria) decides; write the response as evidence for an advocate, and make the revised paper — not the letter — carry the argument.
Output format
[Turn] rebuttal / revision summary-of-changes
[Priority issue] <reviewer concern or stated criterion>
[Decision dimension] significance / soundness / evaluation / threats / clarity / data-availability
[Criterion ledger] <criterion -> DONE/PARTIAL/INFEASIBLE + where in paper/artifact>
[Anonymity check] <no identity leak in the response: passed/issues>