A Cognitive Cost Model of Annotations Based on Eye-Tracking Data

We report on an experiment to track complex decision points in linguistic metadata annotation where the decision behavior of annotators is observed with an eyetracking device. As experimental conditions we investigate different forms of textual context and linguistic complexity classes relative to syntax and semantics. Our data renders evidence that annotation performance depends on the semantic and syntactic complexity of the decision points and, more interestingly, indicates that fullscale context is mostly negligible – with the exception of semantic high-complexity cases. We then induce from this observational data a cognitively grounded cost model of linguistic meta-data annotations and compare it with existing non-cognitive models. Our data reveals that the cognitively founded model explains annotation costs (expressed in annotation time) more adequately than non-cognitive ones.