Learning from students' perception on professors through opinion mining
This work addresses the need for better understanding student feedback in education, but it is incremental as it applies existing NLP and ML techniques to a specific domain without introducing new methods.
This paper tackles the problem of analyzing students' perceptions of professors by applying sentiment analysis and topic modeling to open-ended survey responses, resulting in the implementation and testing of two algorithms to predict sentiment polarity and identify relevant topics.
Students' perception of classes measured through their opinions on teaching surveys allows to identify deficiencies and problems, both in the environment and in the learning methodologies. The purpose of this paper is to study, through sentiment analysis using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques, those opinions in order to identify topics that are relevant for students, as well as predicting the associated sentiment via polarity analysis. As a result, it is implemented, trained and tested two algorithms to predict the associated sentiment as well as the relevant topics of such opinions. The combination of both approaches then becomes useful to identify specific properties of the students' opinions associated with each sentiment label (positive, negative or neutral opinions) and topic. Furthermore, we explore the possibility that students' perception surveys are carried out without closed questions, relying on the information that students can provide through open questions where they express their opinions about their classes.