Decoding Reading Goals from Eye Movements
This work addresses the challenge of decoding reading goals from eye movements, which could enhance adaptive educational technologies, though it is incremental as it builds on existing eye tracking and modeling techniques.
The study tackled the problem of distinguishing between information seeking and ordinary reading for comprehension from eye movements, finding that transformer-based models with scanpath representations and language modeling achieved accurate real-time predictions before participants finished reading.
Readers can have different goals with respect to the text that they are reading. Can these goals be decoded from their eye movements over the text? In this work, we examine for the first time whether it is possible to distinguish between two types of common reading goals: information seeking and ordinary reading for comprehension. Using large-scale eye tracking data, we address this task with a wide range of models that cover different architectural and data representation strategies, and further introduce a new model ensemble. We find that transformer-based models with scanpath representations coupled with language modeling solve it most successfully, and that accurate predictions can be made in real time, long before the participant finished reading the text. We further introduce a new method for model performance analysis based on mixed effect modeling. Combining this method with rich textual annotations reveals key properties of textual items and participants that contribute to the difficulty of the task, and improves our understanding of the variability in eye movement patterns across the two reading regimes.