Roel Willems


2019

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Dependency Parsing with your Eyes: Dependency Structure Predicts Eye Regressions During Reading
Alessandro Lopopolo | Stefan L. Frank | Antal van den Bosch | Roel Willems
Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics

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.