Team ReadMe at CMCL 2021 Shared Task: Predicting Human Reading Patterns by Traditional Oculomotor Control Models and Machine Learning

This system description paper describes our participation in CMCL 2021 shared task on predicting human reading patterns. Our focus in this study is making use of well-known,traditional oculomotor control models and machine learning systems. We present experiments with a traditional oculomotor control model (the EZ Reader) and two machine learning models (a linear regression model and a re-current network model), as well as combining the two different models. In all experiments we test effects of features well-known in the literature for predicting reading patterns, such as frequency, word length and predictability.Our experiments support the earlier findings that such features are useful when combined.Furthermore, we show that although machine learning models perform better in comparison to traditional models, combination of both gives a consistent improvement for predicting multiple eye tracking variables during reading.