At a Glance: The Impact of Gaze Aggregation Views on Syntactic Tagging

Sigrid Klerke, Barbara Plank


Abstract
Readers’ eye movements used as part of the training signal have been shown to improve performance in a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Previous work uses gaze data either at the type level or at the token level and mostly from a single eye-tracking corpus. In this paper, we analyze type vs token-level integration options with eye tracking data from two corpora to inform two syntactic sequence labeling problems: binary phrase chunking and part-of-speech tagging. We show that using globally-aggregated measures that capture the central tendency or variability of gaze data is more beneficial than proposed local views which retain individual participant information. While gaze data is informative for supervised POS tagging, which complements previous findings on unsupervised POS induction, almost no improvement is obtained for binary phrase chunking, except for a single specific setup. Hence, caution is warranted when using gaze data as signal for NLP, as no single view is robust over tasks, modeling choice and gaze corpus.
Anthology ID:
D19-6408
Volume:
Proceedings of the Beyond Vision and LANguage: inTEgrating Real-world kNowledge (LANTERN)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Aditya Mogadala, Dietrich Klakow, Sandro Pezzelle, Marie-Francine Moens
Venue:
WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
51–61
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-6408
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-6408
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sigrid Klerke and Barbara Plank. 2019. At a Glance: The Impact of Gaze Aggregation Views on Syntactic Tagging. In Proceedings of the Beyond Vision and LANguage: inTEgrating Real-world kNowledge (LANTERN), pages 51–61, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
At a Glance: The Impact of Gaze Aggregation Views on Syntactic Tagging (Klerke & Plank, 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-6408.pdf