Eye-Tracking-while-Reading: A Living Survey of Datasets with Open Library Support
This work addresses data sharing and reuse challenges for researchers in cognitive science and machine learning, though it is incremental as it focuses on organization and accessibility rather than new methods.
The authors tackled the problem of fragmented and non-interoperable eye-tracking-while-reading datasets across disciplines by creating a living survey and integrating datasets into a Python library, resulting in an online overview with over 45 features per dataset and support for over 45 datasets.
Eye-tracking-while-reading corpora are a valuable resource for many different disciplines and use cases. Use cases range from studying the cognitive processes underlying reading to machine-learning-based applications, such as gaze-based assessments of reading comprehension. The past decades have seen an increase in the number and size of eye-tracking-while-reading datasets as well as increasing diversity with regard to the stimulus languages covered, the linguistic background of the participants, or accompanying psychometric or demographic data. The spread of data across different disciplines and the lack of data sharing standards across the communities lead to many existing datasets that cannot be easily reused due to a lack of interoperability. In this work, we aim at creating more transparency and clarity with regards to existing datasets and their features across different disciplines by i) presenting an extensive overview of existing datasets, ii) simplifying the sharing of newly created datasets by publishing a living overview online, https://dili-lab.github.io/datasets.html, presenting over 45 features for each dataset, and iii) integrating all publicly available datasets into the Python package pymovements which offers an eye-tracking datasets library. By doing so, we aim to strengthen the FAIR principles in eye-tracking-while-reading research and promote good scientific practices, such as reproducing and replicating studies.