Eye-tracking based classification of Mandarin Chinese readers with and without dyslexia using neural sequence models

Patrick Haller, Andreas Säuberli, Sarah Kiener, Jinger Pan, Ming Yan, Lena Jäger


Abstract
Eye movements are known to reflect cognitive processes in reading, and psychological reading research has shown that eye gaze patterns differ between readers with and without dyslexia. In recent years, researchers have attempted to classify readers with dyslexia based on their eye movements using Support Vector Machines (SVMs). However, these approaches (i) are based on highly aggregated features averaged over all words read by a participant, thus disregarding the sequential nature of the eye movements, and (ii) do not consider the linguistic stimulus and its interaction with the reader’s eye movements. In the present work, we propose two simple sequence models that process eye movements on the entire stimulus without the need of aggregating features across the sentence. Additionally, we incorporate the linguistic stimulus into the model in two ways—contextualized word embeddings and manually extracted linguistic features. The models are evaluated on a Mandarin Chinese dataset containing eye movements from children with and without dyslexia. Our results show that (i) even for a logographic script such as Chinese, sequence models are able to classify dyslexia on eye gaze sequences, reaching state-of-the-art performance, and (ii) incorporating the linguistic stimulus does not help to improve classification performance.
Anthology ID:
2022.tsar-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Virtual)
Editors:
Sanja Štajner, Horacio Saggion, Daniel Ferrés, Matthew Shardlow, Kim Cheng Sheang, Kai North, Marcos Zampieri, Wei Xu
Venue:
TSAR
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
111–118
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.tsar-1.10
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.tsar-1.10
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Patrick Haller, Andreas Säuberli, Sarah Kiener, Jinger Pan, Ming Yan, and Lena Jäger. 2022. Eye-tracking based classification of Mandarin Chinese readers with and without dyslexia using neural sequence models. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022), pages 111–118, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Virtual). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Eye-tracking based classification of Mandarin Chinese readers with and without dyslexia using neural sequence models (Haller et al., TSAR 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.tsar-1.10.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.tsar-1.10.mp4