A Dataset for Discourse Structure in Peer Review Discussions

At the foundation of scientific evaluation is the labor-intensive process of peer review. This critical task requires participants to consume and interpret vast amounts of highly technical text. We show that discourse cues from rebuttals can shed light on the quality and interpretation of reviews. Further, an understanding of the argumentative strategies employed by the reviewers and authors provides useful signal for area chairs and other decision makers. This paper presents a new labeled dataset of 20k sentences contained in 506 review-rebuttal pairs in English, annotated by experts. While existing datasets annotate a subset of review sentences using various schemes, ours synthesizes existing label sets and extends them to include fine-grained annotation of the rebuttal sentences, characterizing the authors' stance towards the reviewers' criticisms and their commitment to addressing them. Further, we annotate \textit{every} sentence in both the review and the rebuttal, including a description of the context for each rebuttal sentence.