Classifying Referential and Non-referential It Using Gaze
Table 2: Weighted F1 scores for an ablation study for different gaze feature groups over the Previous and Next word baseline (60.4)
['[EMPTY]', 'Prev.', '“It”', 'Next', 'It + Next']
According to that table, early processing features for the preceding and next words are expected to outperform the late ones. A possible explanation for this are predictability and spillover effects, as the pronoun it is both highly predictable and easy to skip, because of its high frequency and shortness. Indeed, the gaze features from the it-region itself are not as useful as the ones from the surrounding words.