Dependency Parsing with your Eyes: Dependency Structure Predicts Eye Regressions During Reading

Alessandro Lopopolo, Stefan L. Frank, Antal van den Bosch, Roel Willems


Abstract
Backward saccades during reading have been hypothesized to be involved in structural reanalysis, or to be related to the level of text difficulty. We test the hypothesis that backward saccades are involved in online syntactic analysis. If this is the case we expect that saccades will coincide, at least partially, with the edges of the relations computed by a dependency parser. In order to test this, we analyzed a large eye-tracking dataset collected while 102 participants read three short narrative texts. Our results show a relation between backward saccades and the syntactic structure of sentences.
Anthology ID:
W19-2909
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Emmanuele Chersoni, Cassandra Jacobs, Alessandro Lenci, Tal Linzen, Laurent Prévot, Enrico Santus
Venue:
CMCL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
77–85
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-2909
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-2909
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alessandro Lopopolo, Stefan L. Frank, Antal van den Bosch, and Roel Willems. 2019. Dependency Parsing with your Eyes: Dependency Structure Predicts Eye Regressions During Reading. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, pages 77–85, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Dependency Parsing with your Eyes: Dependency Structure Predicts Eye Regressions During Reading (Lopopolo et al., CMCL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-2909.pdf