Eye Gaze Relevance Feedback Indicators for Information Retrieval

There is a growing interest in the research on interactive information retrieval, particularly in the study of eye gaze-enhanced interaction. Feedback generated from user gaze features is important for developing an interactive information retrieval system. Generating these gaze features have become less difficult with the advancement of the eye tracker system over the years. In this work, eye movement as a source of relevant feedback was examined. A controlled user experiment was carried out and a set of documents were given to users to read before an eye tracker and rate the documents according to how relevant they are to a given task. Gaze features such as fixation duration, fixation count and heat maps were captured. The result showed a medium linear relationship between fixation count and user explicit ratings. Further analysis was carried out and three classifiers were compared in terms of predicting document relevance based on gaze features. It was found that the J48 decision tree classifier produced the highest accuracy.