Inferring word relevance from eye-movements of readers

Reading is one of the most important skills in today's society. The ubiquity of this activity has naturally affected many information systems; the only goal of some is the presentation of textual information. One concrete task often performed on a computer and involving reading is finding relevant parts of text. In the current study, we investigated if word-level relevance, defined as a binary measure of an individual word being congruent with the reader's current informational needs, could be inferred given only the text and eye movements of readers. We found that the number of fixations, first-pass fixations, and the total viewing time can be used to predict the relevance of sentence-terminal words. In light of what is known about eye movements of readers, knowing which sentence-terminal words are relevant can help in an unobtrusive identification of relevant sentences.

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