  In Natural Language Understanding, the task of response generation is usually
focused on responses to short texts, such as tweets or a turn in a dialog. Here
we present a novel task of producing a critical response to a long
argumentative text, and suggest a method based on general rebuttal arguments to
address it. We do this in the context of the recently-suggested task of
listening comprehension over argumentative content: given a speech on some
specified topic, and a list of relevant arguments, the goal is to determine
which of the arguments appear in the speech. The general rebuttals we describe
here (written in English) overcome the need for topic-specific arguments to be
provided, by proving to be applicable for a large set of topics. This allows
creating responses beyond the scope of topics for which specific arguments are
available. All data collected during this work is freely available for
research.
