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Department of Computational Linguistics Digital Linguistics

Paper on generating synthetic scanpaths has been accepted to EMNLP 2023

Our new paper on generating synthetics scanpaths with diffusion models has been accepted at EMNLP 2023!

ScanDL: A Diffusion Model for Generating Synthetic Scanpaths on Texts, accepted to EMNLP 2023
Lena S. Bolliger, David R. Reich, Patrick Haller, Deborah N. Jakobi, Paul Prasse, Lena A. Jäger
[ ArXiv-preprint|bib]

Abstract

Eye movements in reading play a crucial role in psycholinguistic research studying the cognitive mechanisms underlying human language processing. More recently, the tight coupling between eye movements and cognition has also been leveraged for language-related machine learning tasks such as the interpretability, enhancement, and pre-training of language models, as well as the inference of reader- and text-specific properties. However, scarcity of eye movement data and its unavailability at application time poses a major challenge for this line of research. Initially, this problem was tackled by resorting to cognitive models for synthesizing eye movement data. However, for the sole purpose of generating human-like scanpaths, purely data-driven machine-learning-based methods have proven to be more suitable. Following recent advances in adapting diffusion processes to discrete data, we propose ScanDL, a novel discrete sequence-to-sequence diffusion model that generates synthetic scanpaths on texts. By leveraging pre-trained word representations and jointly embedding both the stimulus text and the fixation sequence, our model captures multi-modal interactions between the two inputs. We evaluate ScanDL within- and across-dataset and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art scanpath generation methods. Finally, we provide an extensive psycholinguistic analysis that underlines the model's ability to exhibit human-like reading behavior. Our implementation is made available at this https URL.

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