Maria Barrett

Using reading behavior to predict grammatical functions

This paper investigates to what extent grammatical functions of a word can be predicted from gaze features obtained using eye-tracking. A recent study showed that reading behavior can be used to predict coarse-grained part of speech, but we go beyond this, and show that gaze features can also be used to make more finegrained distinctions between grammatical functions, e.g., subjects and objects. In addition, we show that gaze features can be used to improve a discriminative transition-based dependency parser.

Weakly Supervised Part-of-speech Tagging Using Eye-tracking Data

For many of the world’s languages, there are no or very few linguistically annotated resources. On the other hand, raw text, and often also dictionaries, can be harvested from the web for many of these languages, and part-of-speech taggers can be trained with these resources. At the same time, previous research shows that eye-tracking data, which can be obtained without explicit annotation, contains clues to partof-speech information. In this work, we bring these two ideas together and show that given raw text, a dictionary, and eyetracking data obtained from naive participants reading text, we can train a weakly supervised PoS tagger using a secondorder HMM with maximum entropy emissions. The best model use type-level aggregates of eye-tracking data and significantly outperforms a baseline that does not have access to eye-tracking data.

Reading behavior predicts syntactic categories

It is well-known that readers are less likely to fixate their gaze on closed class syntactic categories such as prepositions and pronouns. This paper investigates to what extent the syntactic category of a word in context can be predicted from gaze features obtained using eye-tracking equipment. If syntax can be reliably predicted from eye movements of readers, it can speed up linguistic annotation substantially, since reading is considerably faster than doing linguistic annotation by hand. Our results show that gaze features do discriminate between most pairs of syntactic categories, and we show how we can use this to annotate words with part of speech across domains, when tag dictionaries enable us to narrow down the set of potential categories.

Reading metrics for estimating task efficiency with MT output

We show that metrics derived from recording gaze while reading, are better proxies for machine translation quality than automated metrics. With reliable eyetracking technologies becoming available for home computers and mobile devices, such metrics are readily available even in the absence of representative held-out human translations. In other words, readingderived MT metrics offer a way of getting cheap, online feedback for MT system adaptation.

Extracting token-level signals of syntactic processing from fMRI - with an application to PoS induction

Neuro-imaging studies on reading different parts of speech (PoS) report somewhat mixed results, yet some of them indicate different activations with different PoS. This paper addresses the difficulty of using fMRI to discriminate between linguistic tokens in reading of running text because of low temporal resolution. We show that once we solve this problem, fMRI data contains a signal of PoS distinctions to the extent that it improves PoS induction with error reductions of more than 4%.