230075 Eye-tracking Methods and Applications for NLP and Psycholinguistics (S) (WiSe 2022/2023)

Eye-tracking has been one of the techniques that provide comprehensive information about the online cognitive processes of readers/observers since it lets to trace the allocation of attention. Eye movements are central to the visual system, they are extremely fast and metabolically cheap, and they have a lower threshold for being triggered as compared to other motor movements. This makes eye tracking a very powerful and accurate tool to investigate cognition. Due to recent technological advancements, not just as an experimental paradigm, they are also getting very common as interaction modalities in many human-machine interaction devices (e.g. gaze-controlled or-incorporated devices).

In this seminar, we will explore eye-tracking methodologies and applications for computational and psycholinguistics research areas.

Students learn about
• the aspects of eye-tracking methodology from both computational and psycholinguistic points of view ( (1) Eye movements as an experimental paradigm and (2) Eye movements as input modality (gaze-based systems)
• various Data Analysis Techniques:
- multimodal Data Analysis: integrating the eye-movement analysis with other involving modalities (speech and vision)
- time-series data analysis
• conducting a mini-research (starting from forming a research question, collecting data, analyzing and interpreting the results

To successfully pass, we ask participants
• to hand in 2-3 small homework assignments
• to make a 15-min presentation on a relevant research paper or relevant Python library/package
• to submit a mini-research paper

The course will be taught in English. General knowledge of Python programming language would be nice, but it is not obligatory.