CMCL 2021 Shared Task on Eye-Tracking Prediction

Eye-tracking data from reading represent an important resource for both linguistics and natural language processing. The ability to accurately model gaze features is crucial to advance our understanding of language processing. This paper describes the Shared Task on Eye-Tracking Data Prediction, jointly organized with the eleventh edition of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL 2021). The goal of the task is to predict 5 different token-level eyetracking metrics from the Zurich Cognitive Language Processing Corpus (ZuCo). Eyetracking data were recorded during natural reading of English sentences. In total, we received submissions from 13 registered teams, whose systems include boosting algorithms with handcrafted features, neural models leveraging transformer language models, or hybrid approaches. The winning system used a range of linguistic and psychometric features in a gradient boosting framework.