ScanDL: A Diffusion Model for Generating Synthetic Scanpaths on Texts

Lena Bolliger, David Reich, Patrick Haller, Deborah Jakobi, Paul Prasse, Lena Jäger


Abstract
Eye movements in reading play a crucial role in psycholinguistic research studying the cognitive mechanisms underlying human language processing. More recently, the tight coupling between eye movements and cognition has also been leveraged for language-related machine learning tasks such as the interpretability, enhancement, and pre-training of language models, as well as the inference of reader- and text-specific properties. However, scarcity of eye movement data and its unavailability at application time poses a major challenge for this line of research. Initially, this problem was tackled by resorting to cognitive models for synthesizing eye movement data. However, for the sole purpose of generating human-like scanpaths, purely data-driven machine-learning-based methods have proven to be more suitable. Following recent advances in adapting diffusion processes to discrete data, we propose ScanDL, a novel discrete sequence-to-sequence diffusion model that generates synthetic scanpaths on texts. By leveraging pre-trained word representations and jointly embedding both the stimulus text and the fixation sequence, our model captures multi-modal interactions between the two inputs. We evaluate ScanDL within- and across-dataset and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art scanpath generation methods. Finally, we provide an extensive psycholinguistic analysis that underlines the model’s ability to exhibit human-like reading behavior. Our implementation is made available at https://github.com/DiLi-Lab/ScanDL.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.960
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15513–15538
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.960
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.960
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lena Bolliger, David Reich, Patrick Haller, Deborah Jakobi, Paul Prasse, and Lena Jäger. 2023. ScanDL: A Diffusion Model for Generating Synthetic Scanpaths on Texts. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 15513–15538, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ScanDL: A Diffusion Model for Generating Synthetic Scanpaths on Texts (Bolliger et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.960.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.960.mp4