brycewang-stanford OOPSLA Author Response
Each OOPSLA round gives authors one written response before decisions are finalized; the 2026 call scheduled it as a four-day Tuesday-to-Friday window per round (exact 2026 dates 待核实 — read them off the live HotCRP instance). What makes the OOPSLA response unlike a classic rebuttal is the decision space: reviewers are not only choosing accept-or-reject, they are choosing among Accept, Minor Revision, Major Revision, and Reject (2026 merged the old Conditional Accept into Minor Revision). Your response is an argument about which bucket the paper's problems belong in.
Reframe every objection as a bucket question
| Reviewer concern type | Bucket you argue for | Argument shape |
|---|---|---|
| Factual misreading | Accept | Quote the submitted PDF: section, page, exact sentence |
| Missing experiment, bounded scope | Minor Revision | Show the experiment is runnable in weeks; sketch the protocol |
| Evaluation redesign, new formalism | Major Revision (next round) | Concede scale honestly; state what the revision would contain |
| "Wrong venue" / fit doubts | Accept or MR | Anchor to precedent shapes (see resources/exemplars/library.md) |
| Soundness hole in a theorem | Depends — triage first | If repairable, give the repaired statement now, not a promise |
Arguing "Accept" against every concern is the classic failure: it tells the committee you would not execute a Minor Revision faithfully, which removes the middle buckets and polarizes the decision toward Reject.
Composition rules
- Lead with the decision-relevant paragraph. State, in five lines, what you believe the correct outcome is and the one or two facts that support it. Committees skim; the first screen does the work.
- Answer questions before defending honor. Direct reviewer questions get numbered answers with pointers into the PDF. Tone disputes get silence.
- Quantify feasibility. "We will add a user study" is not credible inside a Minor Revision; "we will rerun Table 3 with the two requested baselines; scripts already exist in the artifact" is.
- Never introduce results the PDF cannot support. New numbers in a response are unverifiable and reviewers know it; describe what would be measured, not what you privately measured last night.
- Reference the revision caps. Promised additions must fit the 25-page revision limit; promising a new 6-page section is self-defeating.
Triage worksheet
For each review R1..Rn:
extract: questions (Q), factual errors (E), evidence gaps (G), fit doubts (F)
map each to bucket argument (table above)
order: E first (cheap credibility), then Q, then G with feasibility, F last
budget: total response length per current call rules (待核实 per cycle);
spend >50% on the two items most likely to move the outcome
If the outcome will be a revision anyway
When reviews clearly point at Major Revision, use the response to shape the
expectation list: propose the concrete revision contents yourself. Reviewers
who accept your framing write requirements you have already planned for, and
under the round system the same reviewers meet the resubmission — so what you
promise here is what you will be graded on next round (oopsla-review-process).
Output format
[Predicted bucket] Accept / Minor Revision / Major Revision / Reject
[Target bucket] <the outcome the response argues for>
[Top two levers] <concern + one-line counter, ×2>
[Commitments made] <list, each with feasibility note and page cost>
[Response draft] <numbered, PDF-cited, within length budget>