Getting the Most from Eye-Tracking: User-Interaction Based Reading Region Estimation Dataset and Models

Ruoyan Kong, Ruixuan Sun, Charles Chuankai Zhang, Chen Chen, Sneha Patri, Gayathri Gajjela, Joseph A. Konstan

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

A single digital newsletter usually contains many messages (regions). Users' reading time spent on, and read level (skip/skim/read-in-detail) of each message is important for platforms to understand their users' interests, personalize their contents, and make recommendations. Based on accurate but expensive-to-collect eyetracker-recorded data, we built models that predict per-region reading time based on easy-to-collect Javascript browser tracking data. With eye-tracking, we collected 200k ground-truth datapoints on participants reading news on browsers. Then we trained machine learning and deep learning models to predict message-level reading time based on user interactions like mouse position, scrolling, and clicking. We reached 27% percentage error in reading time estimation with a two-tower neural network based on user interactions only, against the eye-tracking ground truth data, while the heuristic baselines have around 46% percentage error. We also discovered the benefits of replacing per-session models with per-timestamp models, and adding user pattern features. We concluded with suggestions on developing message-level reading estimation techniques based on available data.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - ETRA 2023
Subtitle of host publicationACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications
EditorsStephen N. Spencer
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
ISBN (Electronic)9798400701504
DOIs
StatePublished - May 30 2023
Event15th Annual ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications, ETRA 2023 - Tubingen, Germany
Duration: May 30 2023Jun 2 2023

Publication series

NameEye Tracking Research and Applications Symposium (ETRA)

Conference

Conference15th Annual ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications, ETRA 2023
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityTubingen
Period5/30/236/2/23

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant CNS-2016397. We thank the University of Minnesota’s Usability Lab’s User Experience Analysts, Nick Rosencrans, and David Rosen, for their assistance with eye-tracking technology.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 ACM.

Keywords

  • bulk email
  • eye-tracking
  • neural network
  • personalization
  • reading region estimation
  • reading time
  • recommendation

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