Objectives for a Query Language for User-activity Data

One of the aims of the Eye-to-IT project (FP6 IST 517590) is to integrate keyboard logging and eye-tracking data to study and anticipate the behaviour of human translators. This socalled User-Activity Data (UAD) would make it possible to empirically ground cognitive models and to validate hypotheses of human processing concepts in the data. In order to thoroughly ground a cognitive model of the user in empirical observation, two conditions must be met as a minimum. All UAD data must be fully synchronised so that data relate to a common construct. Secondly, data must be represented in a queryable form so that large volumes of data can be analysed electronically.Two programs have evolved in the Eye-to-IT project: TRANSLOG is designed to register and replay keyboard logging data, while GWM is a tool to record and replay eye-movement data. This paper reports on an attempt to synchronise and integrate the representations of both software components so that sequences of keyboard and eye-movement data can be retrieved and their interaction studied.The outcome of this effort would be the possibility to correlate eye- and keyboard activities of translators (the user model) with properties of the source and target texts and thus to uncover dependencies in the UAD.