Eye Tracking and NLP: A Survey and an Outlook

With the rise of LLMs, NLP has been redefining itself as a field of study, with an increasing interest shift towards areas such as NLP for science, model analysis, human-centered AI and user-facing applications. As part of this transformation, in recent years, a new area of NLP which combines text processing with eye movements in reading has been emerging. Recent work has demonstrated that this area has a strong potential for driving innovation in NLP and enhancing its scientific and societal impact. In this survey, we characterize the main streams of work on the intersection of eye tracking for reading and NLP, provide critical commentary on promises and challenges, and identify key open directions that can guide future work in this area.