Dear Reviewers,

We sincerely thank you for your thoughtful and constructive feedback.

We carefully revised the paper in light of the reviewers’ comments. All points have been addressed:

-------------------------

The use of Streamlit:
--> The use of Streamlit serves a dual purpose: it ensures accessibility for non-technical researchers through an interactive interface, and it guarantees reproducibility via a modular architecture separated from the computation engine. Unlike a simple notebook, this choice facilitates deployment, sharing, and collective validation, while still allowing direct reuse of the underlying Python modules.

---------------------

Evaluation:
--> We acknowledge that the evaluation set of 5 annotated text pairs is limited and that no baseline, ablation study, or error analysis was included. Our primary aim was to present the tool’s architecture, functionalities, and relevance for DH research, rather than to claim exhaustive benchmarking. Nevertheless, we agree that systematic evaluation is a key next step. In future work we plan to extend the dataset with larger and more diverse corpora, incorporate standard benchmarks adapted to literary and historical texts, provide systematic comparisons with existing tools, and include detailed error analysis to better situate Versus within the state of the art.


---------------------

The impact on DH scholars?
--> Versus is designed for accessibility and interpretive support. By providing an interactive interface, modular deployment, and visual alignment of correspondences, it enables DH scholars without technical expertise to explore reuse phenomena, validate hypotheses, and integrate computational results into philological practice.

How is the claimed contribution of "critical traceability" achieved?
--> This is achieved through alignment metadata (start–end positions), dynamic visualization of matched passages, and integration of differences via difflib. Each result can be directly traced back to its textual source, ensuring transparency and interpretability beyond raw similarity scores.

---------------------

Conduct pilot studies with actual DH researchers, documenting workflows and usability.
--> A first study is already planned on 18th- and 19th-century French literary texts, as indicated in the paper, where workflows, usability, and interpretive practices will be systematically documented in collaboration with scholars.


---------------------

- Limited contribution: I think it would be better to state the contribution as a tool-building/system paper rather than an algorithmic advance.
--> We acknowledge this point and clarify that our main contribution lies in presenting Versus as a tool-building/system paper. The emphasis is on architecture, accessibility, and integration of existing methods for DH needs, rather than on proposing a novel algorithmic advance.

----------------------

071 072 citation is for what? Which claim are you trying to justify?
--> We thank the reviewer for pointing this out. The three references are included because they each provide surveys or structured overviews of text similarity methods. Together they motivate the four-fold classification adopted in our paper. We will clarify this rationale in the revised version.

----------------------

The mandatory limitation section is missing.
-->
we added the Limitation section.

--------------------------------------------------------

In addition to this response document, several concise additions and reformulations have been integrated directly into the paper (Evaluation, Conclusion, Perspectives, Limitations).


Best regards