Capturing readers' engagement in fiction is a challenging but important aspect of narrative understanding. In this study, we collected 23 readers' reactions to 2 short stories through eye tracking, sentence-level annotations, and an overall engagement scale survey. We analyzed the significance of various qualities of the text in predicting how engaging a reader is likely to find it. As enjoyment of fiction is highly contextual, we also investigated individual differences in our data. Furthering our understanding of what captivates readers in fiction will help better inform models used in creative narrative generation and collaborative writing tools.

翻译：捕捉读者对小说的参与度是叙事理解中具有挑战性但至关重要的方面。本研究通过眼动追踪、句子级标注及整体参与度量表调查，收集了23位读者对两篇短篇小说的反应。我们分析了文本不同特质在预测读者可能产生的参与度方面的显著性。鉴于小说愉悦感具有高度情境依赖性，我们还探究了数据中的个体差异。深化对小说中吸引读者因素的理解，将有助于优化创意叙事生成与协作写作工具所使用的模型。