Author-in-the-Loop Response Generation and Evaluation: Integrating Author Expertise and Intent in Responses to Peer Review

arXiv:2602.11173v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Author response (rebuttal) writing is a critical stage of scientific peer review that demands substantial author effort. Recent work frames this task as automatic text generation, underusing author expertise and intent. In practice, authors possess domain expertise, author-only information, revision and response strategies–concrete forms of author expertise and intent–to address reviewer concerns, and seek NLP assistance that integrates these signals to support effective response writing in peer review. We reformulate author response generation as an author-in-the-loop task and introduce REspGen, a generation framework that integrates explicit author input, multi-attribute control, and evaluation-guided refinement, together with REspEval, a comprehensive evaluation suite with 20+ metrics covering input utilization, controllability, response quality, and discourse. To support this formulation, we construct Re$^3$Align, the first large-scale dataset of aligned review–response–revision triplets, where revisions provide signals of author expertise and intent. Experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs show the benefits of author input and evaluation-guided refinement, the impact of input design on response quality, and trade-offs between controllability and quality. We make our dataset, generation and evaluation tools publicly available.