Mark Torrance


2025

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EyeLLM: Using Lookback Fixations to Enhance Human-LLM Alignment for Text Completion
Astha Singh | Mark Torrance | Evgeny Chukharev
Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2025)

Recent advances in LLMs offer new opportunities for supporting student writing, particularly through real-time, composition-level feedback. However, for such support to be effective, LLMs need to generate text completions that align with the writer’s internal representation of their developing message, a representation that is often implicit and difficult to observe. This paper investigates the use of eye-tracking data, specifically lookback fixations during pauses in text production, as a cue to this internal representation. Using eye movement data from students composing texts, we compare human-generated completions with LLM-generated completions based on prompts that either include or exclude words and sentences fixated during pauses. We find that incorporating lookback fixations enhances human-LLM alignment in generating text completions. These results provide empirical support for generating fixation-aware LLM feedback and lay the foundation for future educational tools that deliver real-time, composition-level feedback grounded in writers’ attention and cognitive processes.