EMTeC: A corpus of eye movements on machine-generated texts

The Eye movements on Machine-generated Texts Corpus (EMTeC) is a naturalistic eye-movements-while-reading corpus of 107 native English speakers reading machine-generated texts. The texts are generated by three large language models using five different decoding strategies, and they fall into six different text-type categories. EMTeC entails the eye movement data at all stages of pre-processing, i.e., the raw coordinate data sampled at 2000 Hz, the fixation sequences, and the reading measures. It further provides both the original and a corrected version of the fixation sequences, accounting for vertical calibration drift. Moreover, the corpus includes the language models' internals that underlie the generation of the stimulus texts: the transition scores, the attention scores, and the hidden states. The stimuli are annotated for a range of linguistic features both at text and at word level. We anticipate EMTeC to be utilized for a variety of use cases such as, but not restricted to, the investigation of reading behavior on machine-generated text and the impact of different decoding strategies; reading behavior on different text types; the development of new pre-processing, data filtering, and drift correction algorithms; the cognitive interpretability and enhancement of language models; and the assessment of the predictive power of surprisal and entropy for human reading times. The data at all stages of pre-processing, the model internals, and the code to reproduce the stimulus generation, data pre-processing, and analyses can be accessed via https://github.com/DiLi-Lab/EMTeC/ .