Recognition of understanding level and language skill using measurements of reading behavior

Abstract

The reading act is an intimate and elusive process that is important to understand. Psycholinguists have long studied the effects of task, personal or document characteristics on reading behavior. An essential factor in the success of those studies lies in the capability of analyzing eye-movements. These studies aim to recognize causal effects on patterns of eye-movements, by contriving variations in task, personal or document characteristics. In this work, we follow the opposite direction. We present a formal framework to recognize reader's level of understanding and language skill given measurements of reading behavior via eye-gaze data. We show significant error reductions to recognize these attributes and provide a detailed study of the most discriminative features.