Average Pause Ratio as an Indicator of Cognitive Effort in Post-Editing: A Case Study

Abstract

Pauses are known to be good indicators of cognitive demand in monolingual language production and in translation. However, a previous effort by O’Brien (2006) to establish an analogous relationship in post-editing did not produce the expected result. In this case study, we introduce a metric for pause activity, the average pause ratio, which is sensitive to both the number and duration of pauses. We measured cognitive effort in a segment by counting the number of complete editing events. We found that the average pause ratio was higher for less cognitively demanding segments than for more cognitively demanding segments. Moreover, this effect became more pronounced as the minimum threshold for pause length was shortened.