--- name: sigir-author-response description: Use when reviews arrive for a SIGIR submission and the authors must decide how to answer — triaging IR-reviewer objections (weak baselines, missing significance tests, collection choice), writing within whatever response mechanism the current SIGIR cycle actually offers, and planning the resubmission path if the answer is no. --- # SIGIR Author Response First establish what response channel exists this cycle. SIGIR does **not** have a famous institutionalized rebuttal ritual the way ICLR or KDD do, and whether a given edition runs an author-response or discussion phase for full/short papers was not verifiable for 2026 (待核实 — check the track page and the OpenReview timeline of your own submission). This skill therefore covers three situations: a real response window, no window at all, and the post-rejection letter. ## Situation 1: the cycle offers a response window Treat it as a precision instrument, not a second paper. SIGIR reviewers are IR methodologists; the objections cluster predictably, and each cluster has a strongest honest answer: | Objection cluster | Weak reply | Strong reply | |---|---|---| | "Baselines are outdated / not tuned" | "We will add X" | Name the tuning protocol already in the paper (grid, budget, dev split) and cite the table row proving parity of effort | | "No significance testing" | "Differences are large" | Report the paired test you ran (test, correction, p or CI) with exact table coordinates; if you truly didn't run one, concede and state what you will report | | "Only one collection" | "Others are future work" | Explain the claim's scope: which property of the collection the claim depends on, and why generalization is or is not asserted | | "Metric choice hides the effect" | Defend the metric abstractly | Show the effect on the reviewer's preferred metric if it is computable from your runs — run files make this a one-line answer | | "This is a known result" | Assert novelty | Contrast mechanisms against the specific cited paper: what it does, what yours does, what breaks if the delta is removed | Rules of engagement: - Answer from the submitted PDF and its cited repository. New experiments are only safe if small, decisive, and clearly labeled as response-phase additions the camera-ready would absorb. - Quote coordinates ("Table 3, row 4; §5.2 ¶2"), never re-argue the whole section. - Keep each reviewer's reply self-contained; meta-reviewers read per-review. - Never break anonymity — no links that reveal a team, no "as we showed at TREC." ## Situation 2: no response window Then the response happens *before submission*. Write the paper so the predictable objections above are pre-answered: a tuning-protocol paragraph, a significance-testing sentence under every close comparison, an explicit claim-scope sentence for the collection lineup. Budget half a page of the 9 for pre-emption; it is the cheapest acceptance probability you can buy at a venue where you may never get to talk back. ## Situation 3: after rejection - Reviews are a free experiment-design consult from three IR specialists. Extract the demanded evidence into a checklist before feelings archive the folder. - Route options in the SIGIR family and neighbors: the next SIGIR cycle, **SIGIR-AP** (which has advertised a revise-and-resubmit route accepting a 1-3 page response letter with a revised previously-rejected paper — verify its current CFP), ECIR, CIKM, WSDM, or a TOIS journal version if the work outgrew conference page budgets. - If resubmitting to any SIGIR-family venue, keep a diff-log: R2's "missing BEIR evaluation" answered in §5.3 is a sentence in the next cover letter or R&R note. ## Drafting discipline ```text Reply skeleton per reviewer (aim: fits on one screen) --------------------------------------------------- Thanks + one-line summary of what we changed/clarify. [W1] -> Answer with coordinates. (Table/§/Fig) -> If conceded: what we will do, where it will go. [W2] ... Closing: the one thing we most want re-weighed, stated once. ``` Anti-patterns that reliably backfire with IR reviewers: - Arguing that nDCG@10 improvements are "obviously meaningful" without a test — this community invented much of the significance-testing-in-IR literature. - Dumping new tables for every complaint: it signals the submission was premature. - Answering the meta-question ("is this SIGIR material?") defensively instead of restating the contribution type (ranking model / evaluation method / resource / analysis) and its intended reader. - Promising camera-ready changes that exceed what the page budget could ever absorb — reviewers do the arithmetic (appendices count inside the budget at SIGIR). ## Tone calibration for a small community IR is a small field: the reviewer you bruise this cycle chairs your session next year. Calibrate register per line, not per document: > **Too hot:** "R2 clearly has not read Section 5, where this is addressed." > **Too cold:** "We thank the reviewer for this insightful comment and will > carefully consider it in future work." > **Right:** "§5.2 ¶3 reports this experiment (Table 4, rows 2-3); we agree the > pointer from §3 was too subtle and will add a forward reference." The pattern: locate, concede the *findability* problem even when the content exists, and commit to the small fix. Reserve firm disagreement for factual errors, and spend it at most once per reviewer — a response that disputes everything is read as disputing nothing. ## Evidence you can compute during a short window Because run files exist (if `sigir-artifact-evaluation` was followed), several reviewer requests are answerable in hours without new training: - A different metric or cutoff on existing runs — minutes with `ir_measures`. - A different significance test or correction — minutes on per-topic scores. - A per-query breakdown by query length/type — an afternoon. - A new baseline or a new collection — **not** window material; promise it only if the camera-ready budget can honestly absorb the result either way. ## Deciding whether to fight or fold - Fight when the misunderstanding is factual and the correction has coordinates. - Fold (and fix) when two or more reviewers independently hit the same evidence gap — at SIGIR that convergence usually means the gap is real. - A borderline paper with one champion is worth a careful, warm, precise response; a paper whose scores agree at reject is worth a better next submission instead. ## Output format ```text [Response channel] confirmed window / none this cycle / post-rejection [Reviewer map] R1: | R2: ... | R3: ... [Triage] answerable-with-coordinates / concede-and-fix / out-of-scope [New-evidence budget] [Resubmission route] next SIGIR cycle / SIGIR-AP R&R / ECIR / CIKM / WSDM / TOIS [One ask] ```