Eye Movement Features Can Predict Human Preferences on Machine-Generated Texts

Xiaoshan He, Xiaoqun Liu, Haodong He, Yu Wang, Yang Xu


Abstract
Eye movement offers valuable insights into human visual attention during assessment of machine-generated texts, yet existing research and resources in this area are limited. To bridge this gap, we introduce Gaze Responses for Evaluating AI Texts (GREAT), a comprehensive dataset capturing human eye-movement features during screen reading of passages generated by large language models (LLMs). The dataset includes raw eye-movement recordings, reading-time measurements, and post-reading evaluations for LLM-generated passage pairs, alongside rigorous validation metrics. The collected eye-movement features demonstrate strong explanatory power in predicting text quality. When integrated with negative log-likelihood (NLL), a commonly used metric for evaluating text quality, it substantially enhances model performance across all standard statistical criteria. These findings demonstrate that eye-movement can act as an effective source of information that complements probabilistic metrics, for the task of automatic text quality assessment. The full dataset and some processing code are publicly available at https://github.com/qwurd231/GREAT.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-srw.42
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Santosh T.Y.S.S., Juan Diego Rodriguez, Ona de Gibert
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
470–486
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-srw.42/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaoshan He, Xiaoqun Liu, Haodong He, Yu Wang, and Yang Xu. 2026. Eye Movement Features Can Predict Human Preferences on Machine-Generated Texts. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), pages 470–486, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Eye Movement Features Can Predict Human Preferences on Machine-Generated Texts (He et al., ACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-srw.42.pdf