Re, Francesco Ignazio;
Opedal, Andreas;
Manaiev, Glib;
Giulianelli, Mario;
Cotterell, Ryan;
(2025)
A Spatio-Temporal Point Process for Fine-Grained Modeling of Reading Behavior.
In:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers).
(pp. pp. 30518-30538).
Association for Computational Linguistics: Vienna, Austria.
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Abstract
Reading is a process that unfolds across space and time, alternating between fixations where a reader focuses on a specific point in space, and saccades where a reader rapidly shifts their focus to a new point. An ansatz of psycholinguistics is that modeling a reader’s fixations and saccades yields insight into their online sentence processing. However, standard approaches to such modeling rely on aggregated eye-tracking measurements and models that impose strong assumptions, ignoring much of the spatio-temporal dynamics that occur during reading. In this paper, we propose a more general probabilistic model of reading behavior, based on a marked spatio-temporal point process, that captures not only how long fixations last, but also where they land in space and when they take place in time. The saccades are modeled using a Hawkes process, which captures how each fixation excites the probability of a new fixation occurring near it in time and space. The duration time of fixation events is modeled as a function of fixation-specific predictors convolved across time, thus capturing spillover effects. Empirically, our Hawkes process model exhibits a better fit to human saccades than baselines. With respect to fixation durations, we observe that incorporating contextual surprisal as a predictor results in only a marginal improvement in the model’s predictive accuracy. This finding suggests that surprisal theory struggles to explain fine-grained eye movements.
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | A Spatio-Temporal Point Process for Fine-Grained Modeling of Reading Behavior |
| Event: | Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) |
| Dates: | Jul 2025 - Jul 2025 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1474 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.1474 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | ACL materials are Copyright © 1963–2025 ACL; other materials are copyrighted by their respective copyright holders. Materials prior to 2016 here are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License. Permission is granted to make copies for the purposes of teaching and research. Materials published in or after 2016 are licensed on a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Linguistics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10216473 |
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