Using sentiment analysis to evaluate qualitative students’ responses

Text analytics in education has evolved to form a critical component of the future SMART campus architecture. Sentiment analysis and qualitative feedback from students is now a crucial application domain of text analytics relevant to institutions. The implementation of sentiment analysis helps understand learners’ appreciation of lessons, which they prefer to express in long texts with little or no restriction. Such expressions depict the learner’s emotions and mood during class engagements. This research deployed four classifiers, including Naïve Bayes (NB), Support Vector Machine (SVM), J48 Decision Tree (DT), and Random Forest (RF), on a qualitative feedback text after a semester-based course session at the University of Education, Winneba. After enough training and testing using the k-fold cross-validation technique, the SVM classification algorithm performed with a superior accuracy of 63.79%.