PoTeC: A German Naturalistic Eye-tracking-while-reading Corpus

TL;DR

PoTeC is a comprehensive eye-tracking corpus capturing naturalistic reading behaviors of experts and novices across scientific texts, enabling diverse research on reading strategies and comprehension.

Contribution

It introduces the first naturalistic eye-tracking corpus with domain-expert and novice data, using a factorial design and detailed linguistic annotations.

Findings

Includes eye-movement data from 75 participants reading 12 texts

Contains annotations for linguistic features at multiple levels

Data and code are openly available for research use

Abstract

The Potsdam Textbook Corpus (PoTeC) is a naturalistic eye-tracking-while-reading corpus containing data from 75 participants reading 12 scientific texts. PoTeC is the first naturalistic eye-tracking-while-reading corpus that contains eye-movements from domain-experts as well as novices in a within-participant manipulation: It is based on a 2x2x2 fully-crossed factorial design which includes the participants' level of study and the participants' discipline of study as between-subject factors and the text domain as a within-subject factor. The participants' reading comprehension was assessed by a series of text comprehension questions and their domain knowledge was tested by text-independent background questions for each of the texts. The materials are annotated for a variety of linguistic features at different levels. We envision PoTeC to be used for a wide range of studies including but not limited to analyses of expert and non-expert reading strategies. The corpus and all the accompanying data at all stages of the preprocessing pipeline and all code used to preprocess the data are made available via GitHub: https://github.com/DiLi-Lab/PoTeC.