@InProceedings{vajjala-EtAl:2016:CL4LC,
  author    = {Vajjala, Sowmya  and  Meurers, Detmar  and  Eitel, Alexander  and  Scheiter, Katharina},
  title     = {Towards grounding computational linguistic approaches to readability: Modeling reader-text interaction for easy and difficult texts},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Linguistic Complexity (CL4LC)},
  month     = {December},
  year      = {2016},
  address   = {Osaka, Japan},
  publisher = {The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee},
  pages     = {38--48},
  abstract  = {Computational approaches to readability assessment are generally built and
	evaluated using gold standard corpora labeled by publishers or teachers rather
	than being grounded in observations about human performance. Considering that
	both the reading process and the outcome can be observed, there is an empirical
	wealth that could be used to ground computational analysis of text readability.
	This will also support explicit readability models connecting text complexity
	and the reader’s language proficiency to the reading process and outcomes.
	This paper takes a step in this direction by reporting on an experiment to
	study how the rela- tion between text complexity and reader’s language
	proficiency affects the reading process and performance outcomes of readers
	after reading We modeled the reading process using three eye tracking
	variables: fixation count, average fixation count, and second pass reading
	duration. Our models for these variables explained 78.9%, 74% and 67.4%
	variance, respectively. Performance outcome was modeled through recall and
	comprehension questions, and these models explained 58.9% and 27.6% of the
	variance, respectively. While the online models give us a better under-
	standing of the cognitive correlates of reading with text complexity and
	language proficiency, modeling of the offline measures can be particularly
	relevant for incorporating user aspects into readability models.},
  url       = {http://aclweb.org/anthology/W16-4105}
}