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home / papers / 2026 / CoordiMap: Conceptual Proposition of a new Framework for the Annotation of Verbal Elicitation Paths on Visual Experiment Stimuli and Introduction of the Associated Annotation Tool

CoordiMap: Conceptual Proposition of a new Framework for the Annotation of Verbal Elicitation Paths on Visual Experiment Stimuli and Introduction of the Associated Annotation Tool

Paper · 2026 · Carmen Schacht

Summary

Experiments where participants verbally describe static images produce speech, visual stimuli, and sometimes gaze recordings. These are hard to align consistently, even though the order and anchoring of a description may reveal how the scene was perceived. The paper proposes the verbal elicitation path as a new data type: a speaker's linguistic units are placed as coordinate points on the stimulus image and linked in the order they were produced. This mirrors how eye-tracking represents fixations and saccades. To support the concept, the author releases a first version of CoordiMap, a lightweight annotation tool that runs locally. Annotators click positions on an uploaded image and assign labels, and the tool draws the resulting path. Repeated consecutive clicks on one spot produce a larger dot, imitating longer fixation durations. The tool does not assume any theoretical framework, so users decide which units to annotate, from coreference to information structure. The work is conceptual and is shown only through an example use case. It matters because it puts language and gaze in a shared spatial format, even when different participant groups produced the two data types.

Key points

  • Export format: CoordiMap writes annotations to .csv files with a label plus X and Y coordinates for each point, designed to be directly comparable with eye-tracking data.
  • Implementation: The tool is written in Python with a tkinter GUI. It can be started from a script or an .exe file and includes a README.
  • Licensing: It will be released under CC BY 4.0 via OSF (osf.io/8ke4c).
  • Positioning against related work: Image annotators like LabelImg and the VGG Image Annotator (VIA) focus on tasks such as bounding boxes and do not support elicitation paths. Meaning Maps (Henderson and Hayes) and the combined gaze–speech studies of Griffin and Bock (2000) motivate the approach.
  • Limitations and next steps: There is no empirical evaluation yet. A planned pilot study will compare gaze data with elicitation paths and assess inter-annotator consistency and usability. The research is funded by DFG under SFB 1102.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Ruhr University BochumBochum · Germany25 works · 1,189 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPsychology · 1,552 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 870 worksNeuroscience · 165 worksCognitive Neuroscience · 164 works

Cite

Cite as Carmen Schacht. 2026. CoordiMap: Conceptual Proposition of a new Framework for the Annotation of Verbal Elicitation Paths on Visual Experiment Stimuli and Introduction of the Associated Annotation Tool. Proceedings fo the Second International Workshop on Eye-Tracking Resources and Evaluation for Human-Aligned NLP.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/3pgk5582pu3t

@inproceedings{schacht2026coordimap,
  title = {{CoordiMap: Conceptual Proposition of a new Framework for the Annotation of Verbal Elicitation Paths on Visual Experiment Stimuli and Introduction of the Associated Annotation Tool}},
  author = {Carmen Schacht},
  booktitle = {Proceedings fo the Second International Workshop on Eye-Tracking Resources and Evaluation for Human-Aligned NLP},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/3pgk5582pu3t},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3pgk5582pu3t}
}

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