Real Time Sentiment Analysis of

Student’s Feedback
ABSTRACT

Educational Data Mining (EDM) plays vital role in the improvement of education by keeping a check on the performance of
the student in his/her studies and by trying to understand learning of the students. Conducting feedbacks from students at the
end of the year/semester has an issue and disadvantage, as the students who already taken the course are not getting the
benefit of the course as their issues were not solved. In order to benefit the students, those who are currently taking the
course, their feedback should be taken in real time and their issues must be resolved in real time. This is a beneficial
approach as this allows the teacher and students to resolve the teaching and learning issues. Analyzing the student’s
comments and feedbacks by using the sentiment analysis techniques helps to identify student’s positive, neutral or negative
review towards the current teaching methodology adopted by teacher.

INDEX TERMS Sentiment analysis, Data Mining, Educational Data Mining, Student’s Feedback,
teaching methodology, Education, positive, negative, neutral, polarity.

I. INTRODUCTION usually conducted at the end of semester or at the end

Sentiment Analysis in education is developed to
address the problems in education sector. Taking
feedback from students to lecturer allows the students
to guide the teacher into teaching the course in a best
possible that the can understand the lecture [1], [2], [3].
Sentiment analysis is a field that works on the basis of
to make sense of a textual comment/feedback/opinion.
Comments or opinions can be positive or can be
negative[1], [4]. Analyzing student’s given feedback
using the techniques of Sentiment Analysis will be
helpful to identify positive, negative or even more
refined behaviors of students, they have towards the
current teaching [1]. The feedbacks provided by
students can highlight different issues students are
facing with the lecture or with the teacher. Most of the
times students do not understand the topic teacher is
trying to explain, they are not getting the topic because
the teaching methodology adopted by teacher is very
difficult to understand, by giving feedbacks students
can deliver their issue to the teacher [4].
Educational institute in order to improve the quality of
education takes the feedback from students [1]. The
comments of students then analyzed to read the
sentiments of the students to enhance and improve the
teacher’s teaching performance [1]. The main focus of
sentiment analysis is to determine the feelings of
students given in the form of text. That feeling might
be student’s opinion or attitude. The vital role of the
analysis is to classify the polarity of the feedback or
opinion given in the form of textual data as positive,
negative or neutral [3]. Feedbacks from students are
of the term [1], [3], [5]. Gathering feedbacks from
students at the end of semester has a disadvantage of
not benefitting the students those who are taking the
course or that have already taken the course.
This paper aims to address the problem, creation of a
system is proposed that will analyze the student’s
feedback in real time and present those feedbacks to
the teacher. In order to benefit the students who are
currently taking the course the feedback from students
should be taken in real time and their issues must be
addressed in real time. This will be help the teacher to
benefit students by resolving their issues in a beneficial
way. Analyzing the feedback provided by students by
using sentiment analysis techniques will help to
identify student’s positive, negative and even more
refined emotions that students have towards the current
teaching methodology adopted by teacher.
II. BACKGROUND
According to Chauhan, Agrawal [2] almost all of the
educational institutes, most commonly universities
showing a lot of interest to improve the quality of
education by keeping check and balance or by
monitoring teacher’s teaching, student’s learning by
analyzing the feedback provided by students using
sentiment analysis. To improve the teaching-learning
process the maximum involvement of students,
teachers and other stakeholders are required to identify
different aspects of education. Another class of study
by Ullah [1] which states the efforts and attempts of the
educational institutes to gather the student’s feedbacks

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 towards the teacher’s teaching in order to enhance the
teaching performance of a teacher or instructor.
According to another study by Rajput, Haider [3] the
feedback is an essential part of education to improve
the quality of teacher and learning. Students express
their issues by giving different comments/feedbacks
these comments are analyzed by using sentiment
analysis that whether the comments are positive or
negative.
The feedback system became very useful in the
educational domain, where the teacher delivers a
lecture and student’s share their opinions towards that
lecture. The opinions are analyzed to address the
difficulties of students by using sentiment analysis,
where sentiment analysis is a computational study of
people’s like and their dislike about an entity or about
an object also revealing the polarity of the natural
sentences/word e.g. positive, negative or neutral [1].
Also analyzing students’ comments using sentiment
analysis approaches can help to classify that the
students’ feelings are positive or negative. Students’
can mention or highlight the issues they faced during
lecture, through their feedbacks they can indicate their
issues to the lecturer [4]. In the domain of education
sentiment analysis is used to extract the hidden
knowledge from students through a feedback [2]. The
evaluation of teacher and class by students’ now is
considered a usual practice in the educational
institutes. This process helps to provide quality
education and helps the instructor to distill their
teaching methodology. The sentiment analysis
techniques are used to identify the textual contents that
either they are positive or negative provided by
students as feedback [3]. Sentiment analysis helping
the students’ those who have issues to forward their
concerns to the teacher so that he can improve his/her
teaching methodology as a result students’ get quality
education and understand the lecture clearly [6].
currently studying a course and facing issues to
understanding a lecture by getting the feedback in real
time and solving the issues in real-time [7] .
In this section, paper’s acceptance and rejection criteria
is defined, article selected for study if the following
statements are true: -
1. The article must be in English language.
2. Articles must be related to Sentiment Analysis
or student’s feedback analysis.
3. Articles must be published between 2009 and
2020.
4. Conference paper will be selected if they are
very relevant.
Article rejected for study if the following statements
are true: -
1. If article related to student’s feedback analysis
but not to sentiment analysis or vice versa.
2. Article related to other than educational
domain.
3. Article without any methodology evidence.
III. METHODOLOGY
In this study, Long Short-Term Memory model
(LSTM) model is implemented for the sentiment
analysis and text classification. An algorithm is
designed for this purpose, explaining the architecture
of the system shown in Figure 1. System is divided into
five phases 1) First phases is Data preprocessing. 2)
Second is word embedding, 3) LSTM model for the
hypothesis testing for the prediction accuracy, 4) Dense
layer in order to increase model complexity, 5)
Softmax function for multi-class classification
problems.
Data Preprocessing

In the light of above mentioned studies, it is stated that Embedding Layer

the educational institutes used to get the feedback at
the end of semester or year [1], [3], [5]. Taking the
.4 .6 .5 .4 .4
feedback at the end of semester has a disadvantage that .2 .2
.2 .3 .3
it is not benefitting the students those who are taking .1 .1 .3 .1 .1
the course or that have already taken the course. In
order to benefit the students who are currently taking
the course the feedback from students should be taken
in real time and their issues must be addressed in real .9 .6 .5 .4 .5
time. This will be help the teacher to benefit students .2 .3 .3 .2 .2
.1 .1 .3 .1 .1
by resolving their issues in a beneficial way. Analyzing
the feedback provided by students by using sentiment
analysis techniques will help to identify student’s
positive, negative and even more refined emotions that Dense
students have towards the current teaching
methodology adopted by teacher. In brief this study is
expected to contribute to benefit the students who are Softmax

VOLUME XX, 2017 1


.8 .7 .1 …………... .9
Figure 1 Sentiment Analysis Model Structure.
A. Data Source
Nowadays, internet has become one of the major
source for people to express their feelings. Users
are now more willing to share and express their
opinions or feedbacks online [8]. There is an
advantage as more and more opinions can be
extracted from a wider range of source. In data
mining, social networks have been used for years
[9]. This gave so many good advantages in using
social media such as twitter as twitter is up-to-
date and shares information about current news
and events happening all over the globe [10]. In this
project the data has to be in real time and for this
purpose twitter will be used. The tweets of the
users are collected from the twitter on the basis
of that input specified by user is in the form of
Hashtags [10]. The process of tweet classification
is initiated first by the collections of the tweets. It is
achievable to collect the data of twitter by
using a twitter API. RAuth library is used in
performing authentication by giving in keys. A
consumer key, access token, consumer secret
and access token secret for twitter application and
perform Handshake protocol [11]. After all this, a
certificate downloaded and to access the tweets a
PIN is generated for the application.
B. Data Preprocessing
Once the data is obtained from the source, the data
has to be pre-processed in order to extract
useful information. This can be done by removing
the spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes [12].
In this research the following steps for the pre-
processing are considered. The process of
filtration, in this process the punctuations,
numbers and other special characters or
symbols are removed because they are not giving
some useful information, but on the other
hand creates uncertainty and doubts which can
mislead from the context. The second process,
is the process of tokenization which is used
word categorization from the sentence,
breaking the sentence into words. The case
convention process which is used after the filtration
and tokenization process, the tokenized words are
mutate into lower case. The articles in the
sentences are referred as stop words. After the
process of filtration, the tokenization process and
case conversion process are two processes
which plays vital role in the removal of stop
words. These are used for the word connection
and to make understanding for sentences.
VOLUME XX, 2017
Through stop words we are able to remove
non-relevant information by categorizing the article
words into a meaningful context. As a result, the
model accuracy increases through the polarity
assigned to words.
C. Word Embedding
Word Embedding is a type of word
representation, allowing words having similar
meaning to have a similar representation. In a
document, the word embedding is the most
significant representation of words. The main
focus is in maintaining the relationship of words,
capture the context of word in a document in
order to identify the semantic and syntactic
similarity. In our proposed model the word
process is a pre-trained word vector and it is
given as an input to the Long Short-Term
Memory (LSTM) network. First of all, these
vectors are given to Word2Vec model of Google
and in the second step they are pre-trained with
the given model on the updated datasets of
Google news of 100 billion. A 300-dimentioanal
vectors for 3 million words, phases are produced
by Word2vec model. Also supports the structure
of bag of words.
D. Long Short Term Memory (LSTM)
A type of recurrent neural network which is
capable of learning order dependence in a
sequence prediction problem is call Long Short-
Term Memory (LSTM) network. The
representation of a sentence is done by LSTM
model in a sequential manner. Word vector works
as an input for one stage that fed the LSTM layer
and in order to compute the next hidden state,
the previous hidden state is fed to LSTM. The
fundamental advantages for the
implementation of LSTM for sentence vector is
that to out the fixed length sentence vector for
any random variable length sentences. It also
stores the order of word and it has no
dependence on other linguistic features in order to
compute semantics. The predictions are in
RNN, sequentially, which assign a memory to the
network. The results got from the previous
predictions can help to improve the future
predictions. LSTM provides an additional feature
to RNN which gives RNN a fine-grained control
over the memory. This feature is responsible
to control that how much the current input
concerns in the creation of new memory, and
which sections of memory plays important role in
output generation. The performance of the
model is improved by word2vec in the absence
of large supervised training set.
1
 ⨂
The following equation shows the flow of LSTM
model where sigmoid logistic function is used
and there are some basic gates, input gate controls
how much new inputs are added into Forget
model, forget gate shows the amount of old data
sent by previous hidden state and the output gate
is used to determine the amount of influence of
current node to the external network.
Following are the equations involved in order to
compute the values of LSTM:

Input Activations REFERENCES AND FOOTNOTES

i t =σ ¿ + W (HI ) (cI) (I ) A. REFERENCES
H t −1 + W C t−1 +¿ b )
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Input Gate
2016 Internation
f t=σ ¿ + W (Hf ) H t −1 + W (cf ) C t−1 +¿ b(f ))
Workshop on Computational Intelligence (IWCI).
2016. IEEE.
Forget Gate
C t=¿ f t ⨂ C t−1 +¿ i t ⨂ tanh ⁡¿+ 2. Chauhan, G.S., P. Agrawal, and Y.K. Meena,
( Hc ) (c ) Aspect-based sentiment analysis of students’
W H t +b ¿ feedback to improve teaching–learning
process, in Information and Communication
Output Gate
Technology for Intelligent Systems. 2019,
o t=σ ¿ + W (Ho) H t −1 + W (co) C t−1 +¿ b(o))
Springer. p. 259-266.
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ht =o t ⨂ tanh ⁡(C t ) based sentiment analysis of teachers’
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embedding features, input length and (ICRIIS). 2017. IEEE.
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forwards the output to the dense layer for the sentiment analysis⨂of students opinion using
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Output Ot
7. Go, A., R. Bhayani, and L. Huang, Twitter
It
Input sentiment classification using distant
LSTM block supervision. CS224N project report, Stanford,
2009. 1(12): p. 2009.
⨂ Ct tanh
⨂ ht
tanh

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8. Zuo, M., et al. Data mining strategies and
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