Project goals
The motivation for this project is the need for collecting objective data about reading comprehension and reading behavior. This data is useful for natural language processing or linguistic research, but often require laboratory conditions and sometimes expensive equipment (e.g. for eye-tracking or EEG). This project aims to leverage smartphones to conduct experiments in a more natural environment and to make collecting data more efficient and enjoyable – for participants and researchers.
These are the main goals guiding Okra’s design:
- The app should be accessible, easy and fun to use for all relevant target groups.
- The tasks should be easily configurable and extensible.
- The collected data should be useful (focus on research and automatic text processing).
- The experiment environment should be as natural as possible (not “lab conditions”).
- Experiments for longitudinal studies should be possible.
These are some possible use cases:
- Research targeting between-subject differences in reading comprehension/behavior.
- Research targeting the influence of text/language features on comprehension.
- Data collection for text difficulty classification.
- Evaluation of manual or automatic text simplification output.
- Assessment of individual reading skills.