Abstract
Capturing readers’ engagement in fiction is a challenging but important aspect of narrative understanding. In this study, we collected 23 readers’ reactions to 2 short stories through eye tracking, sentence-level annotations, and an overall engagement scale survey. We analyzed the significance of various qualities of the text in predicting how engaging a reader is likely to find it. As enjoyment of fiction is highly contextual, we also investigated individual differences in our data. Furthering our understanding of what captivates readers in fiction will help better inform models used in creative narrative generation and collaborative writing tools.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.wnu-1.13
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Narrative Understanding
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Nader Akoury, Elizabeth Clark, Mohit Iyyer, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Faeze Brahman, Khyathi Chandu
- Venue:
- WNU
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 73–81
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.wnu-1.13
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.wnu-1.13
- Cite (ACL):
- Rose Neis, Karin De Langis, Zae Myung Kim, and Dongyeop Kang. 2023. An Analysis of Reader Engagement in Literary Fiction through Eye Tracking and Linguistic Features. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Narrative Understanding, pages 73–81, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- An Analysis of Reader Engagement in Literary Fiction through Eye Tracking and Linguistic Features (Neis et al., WNU 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2023.wnu-1.13.pdf