The eye as the window of the language ability: Estimation of English skills by analyzing eye movement while reading documents

Reading-life log is a research field of analyzing our activities of reading documents to know more about readers and documents. In this paper we propose an implementation of reading-life log which is to estimate the English language skill by analyzing the activities of reading English documents. As input for the analysis, we employ eye movement information, because we consider the eye movement of skillful readers is far different from that of novices. From the experiments, we have found that the following two features are informative: (1) the sum of fixation duration, and (2) the sum of the velocity of saccades. By using these features the proposed method is to estimate the class of English skill from among low, middle and high, which are defined based on the scores of English standardized test called TOEIC. From the experimental results with 11 subjects and 10 documents, we have been successful to estimate the class with the accuracy of 90.9%.