International Conference on Communication and Signal Processing, July 28 - 30, 2020, India
Analysis of Student Feedback and
Recommendation to Tutors
Karunya K, Aarthy S, Karthika R, Jegatha Deborah L
Abstract—An important criterion in teaching is to
analyze how well the teaching has been effective for the
student’s. In order to do such analysis student’s
feedback is obtained which would depict the quality and
quantity of teaching. The existing evaluation technique
tells about the opinion levels but does not clearly inform
is it necessary to bring immediate changes in teaching or
can proceed with the current teaching strategy. To
address this drawback an automated ideology is
proposed to initially analyze the student feedback
comments and further based on the analysis introduce a
recommendation system that would give a clear idea
whether to bring in changes or proceed with the
currently adopted teaching technique. This would
provide tutors insight about opinion and allow them to
make professionally sound decision so as to upgrade the
performance of students.
Index Term—Sentiment Analysis, Opinion mining,
Lexicon based approach, Student’s comments, LDA.
I. INTRODUCTION
I N order to enrich the learning experience,
feedback from students is an essential component
to be encouraged. Feedback from individual often
describes their opinion on different aspects, but such
individual student feedback is not sufficient to bring
in modification in the course. We require feedback
from several students for consideration. Close-ended
feedback does not encourage to express the exact
sentiment of students.
To know the exact sentiment of the student’s
textual feedback can be obtained [1]. The main motto
behind obtaining textual feedback is it gives a clear
insight to the tutor and at the same time the student is
allowed to express the opinion without any constraint
[2].
Karunya K is with the Department of CSE, UCE, Tindivanam,
India(email: karunya98sai@gmail.com)
Aarthy S is with the Department of CSE, UCE, Tindivanam,
India(email: saarthy1299@gmail.com)
Karthika R is with the Department of CSE, UCE, Tindivanam,
India(email: karti.rn@gmail.com)
Jegatha Deborah L is with the Department of CSE, UCE,
Tindivanam, India(email: blessedjeny@gmail.com)
978-1-7281-4988-2/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE
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In this work we follow sentiment analysis techniques
to analyze student feedback.
Latent Dirichlet Allocation is used to classify the
document into several topics. The opinion for each
keyword is calculated, which is done by opinion
mining using sentiment word database. Opinion
mining a field of study that which is used to analyze
people emotions, views, concern, opinions,
sentiments, evaluations. Feedbacks or opinions are the
most common approaches to get to know about others
expectation or suggestions Feedbacks or opinions are
the most common approaches to get to know about
others expectation or suggestions [3]. In case of
analyzing student feedback it is very important for
teacher to know about the status of the course. An
average teacher will find it tedious to read each and
every individual student feedbacks as they might be
time consuming and require lot of patience. To
overcome this flow automated sentiment analysis
systems are generated. The proposed system will help
us to develop a recommendation system with
following abilities:
i. In areas where the opinion turns out to be
negative, there the suggestion would be given.
ii. This would provide tutors a clear idea about the
areas that would require attention.
This paper is organized as follows. In section II
previously proposed theory and processes are
explained. In section III the concepts involved are
given a brief description. In section IV the
methodology to process the student comments and
method to obtain sentiment for the feedback is given.
Section V discusses the performance analysis and
section VI gives the conclusion.
II. RELATED WORKS
Samuel Cunnigham-Nelson et. al. proposed the
technique to visualize student satisfaction with the
help of machine learning. This process will
automatically analyze and produce visual
representation for student feedback, which can lead to
quick analysis of positive and negative aspects in a
course.
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 B. Pang and L. Lee proposed a system to
understand the opinion of others. This approach
promises to directly enable opinion – oriented
information –seeking systems. It is very important to
know what others think in order to support changes if
required for better performance. This method allows
to analyze the opinion of student’s regarding the
course.
David M. Blei et. al. [4] proposed a generative
probabilistic model –Latent Dirichlet Allocation
(LDA) for topic modelling. This approach can be used
to detect topics. From the set of documents LDA
estimate document –topic distribution ߠ and topic –
Word distributionÞ.
Khin Zeawan Aung and Nyein Nyein Myo [5]
proposed a system to analyze the student feedback
comments using lexicon –based approach. Feedbacks
from student will give great insight about the teaching
techniques and highlights the pros and cons of the
course individually.
III. CONCEPTS
A. Sentiment analysis
Sentiment Analysis is a method adopted to find the
sentiment expressed in texts [6]. These are usually
feedbacks, suggestion forms often obtained through
surveys or reviews. Here student’s feedback may tell
about their course satisfaction or modification
expected in teaching technique [7]. Eventually the
task of sentiment analysis is to extract the sentiment
by using lexicon-based approach being famous. In
lexicon–based approach a sentiment lexicon is utilized
to identify the polarity of a textual description [8].
The polarity usually is of three types positive,
negative and neutral.
B. Latent dirichlet allocation
Latent Dirichlet Allocation is a generative
probability model used to extract semantic
information from text data and comments. Using LDA
the entire feedback is categorized into set of topics
which will be referred as an aspect for sentiment
analysis [9].
LDA assumes the following generative
for each document W in a corpus D.
1. Choose N ̱ܲ‫݊݋ݏݏ݅݋‬ሺ‫א‬ሻ
2. Choose ߠ̱‫ݎ݅ܦ‬ሺߙሻ
3. For each of the N words ܹ௡ 
a) Choose a topic ܼ௡ ̱ Multinomial (ߠሻ
b) Choose a word ܹ௡ from p (ܹ௡ | ܼ௡ ,ߚ) , a
multinomial probability conditional on the topic
ܼ௡ .So topic-word matrix and doc-topic matrix is
generated.
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C. Opinion mining
Opinion mining is used to track the views of
student’s about particular aspect. Analysis of student
comments using opinion mining can tell if the
comment is positive or negative. Few feedback might
reveal that the student is satisfied and find the classes
productive. Whereas few students may denote the
flaws in the teaching which might need rectification
for better academic performance. The sentiment word
database consist of 745 words, out of which 448
words are positive words 263 are total negative
words. The score ranges from -3 to +3. 1 to 3 are
considered as positive and -1 to -3 are considered as
negative score. Neutral category denotes a sentiment
score which equals zero [10].
IV. METHODOLOGY
A. Preprocessing Of Document
The entire document is transferred into lower case
for easy preprocessing. Then tokenization is applied
to convert text into tokens before generating the
matrix forms as shown in architecture Fig. 1. The
entire document is broken into words, constructing a
bag vectors, as key-of-words.
Fig. 1. Architecture for analysis and recommendation.
Stop words are the most commonly or frequent
occurring words which are not relevant in the context
of data and does not contribute any deeper meaning to
the phrase and hence removed. Lemmatisation aims to
remove inflectional endings and returns to the base or
dictionary form of word. The proposed architecture
for analyzing the student feedbacks and providing
recommendations to the tutors .
process
B. Generating Matrix Form
Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) is a
probabilistic topic modeling method that gives us an
approach to tease out the possible topics that we do
not know of beforehand. The major key assumptions
behind LDA is that each given documents is a mix of
multiple topics [11]. We have a set of documents D1,
D2,ǥ ǡ ‫݀ܦ‬. Each document is composed of N
“effective” words from which we could infer K
topics.
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 Each document is a mixture of corpus-wide topics
To calculate the count matrices randomly assign
topics to each word / token in each document and then
calculate word to topic matrix and document to topic
count matrix. To infer the topics for each token we
use collapsed Gibb’s sampling from LDA .
Finally the topic probability for each token is
calculated. Based on highest probability of two topics
for a word LDA will provide the final topic for each
particular word in particular document provide the
final topic for each particular word in particular
document.
஽்
+ߚ
ௐ்
‫ܥ‬௪௝ ‫ܥ‬ௗ௝ + ߙ
P (ܼ௜ୀ௝ |ܹ௜ ,݀௜ ) ‫ן‬ *
σௐ ௐ்
௪ୀଵ ‫ܥ‬௪௝ +Wߚ + Tߙ ஽்
σ்௧ୀଵ ‫ܥ‬ௗ௧
(1)
Finally the topic probability for each token is
calculated. Based on highest probability of two topics
for a word LDA will provide the final topic for each
particular word in particular document.
C. Topic Modelling
To generate the topic LDA is implemented in python
Gensim package. As like any other algorithm LDA
can only understand numeric values. So the
preprocessed text is converted into numbers. Initially
the text is converted into bag of words to make it
numeric which can be assumed as dictionary, where
key denotes he word and value denotes number of
times that word occurs in entire corpus. The two main
inputs of LDA topic model are:
Dictionary: Unique ids for each unique word.
Corpus: For each document number of times a
particular word appeared
Dictionary: {‘tutorial’:0, ‘assessment’:1}
Corpus: [(0, 1), (1, 2)]
In corpus the notation indicates that the word tutorial
occurs once and assessment occurs twice. LDA model
is built with different topics where each type is a
combination of keywords and each keyword
contributes a certain weight age to that particular
topic.
D. Opinion Extraction Using Lexicon Based
Approach
The system will compare each token in the comment
by using opinion word database. The tokens are
identified if they belong to positive, negative or
neutral comment [12].The polarity scores are assigned
with the help of sentiment word database [13].
ܹ‫ ݏ‬ൌ ܱ‫ݏ‬ (2)
ܹ‫ ݏ‬ൌ  ሺͳͲͲΨ ൅ ‫݂݊݅ݏ‬ሻ ‫ݏܱ כ‬
ܹ‫ ݏ‬ൌ ሺͳͲͲΨ ൅ ‫݂݊݅ݏ‬ሻ ‫ כ‬ሺͳͲͲΨ ൅ ‫݂݊݅ݏ‬ሻ ‫ݏܱ כ‬
ܹ‫ ݏ‬ൌ ܹ‫ݏ‬ሺെͳሻ(5)
The semantic orientation score of combining words is
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denoted byܹ‫ݏ‬. The score of opinion word from
sentiment word database is denoted by ܱ‫ݏ‬Ǥ
Table I shows in opinion for corresponding polarity
score. In order to get the total polarity score, the
semantic orientation score of all words in the
comment are summed up, which could be done by
[14]
PTs =σ௡௜ୀଵ ܹ‫ ݅ݏ‬, (Wsi ‫ א‬T) (6)
To calculate the average polarity score of all
comments use
P=σே
௜ୀଵ ܲܶ‫݅ݏ‬Ȁܰ (7)
TABLE I
OPINION MINING
POLARITY SCORE OPINION RESULT
P>0 or <=1 Weakly positive
P>1 or <=2 Moderately positive
P>2 Strongly positive
P<0 or >=(-1) Weakly negative
P<(-1) or >=(-2) Moderately negative
P<(-2) Strongly negative
P=0 Neutral
E. Recommendation System
It is equally important to be able to suggest
recommendation in cases where alterations should be
done so as to improve academic performances. Once
opinion extraction is done for the student feedback we
will get a clear idea of the student’s opinion about the
course, whether the course was satisfying or require
changes in any of the aspects [15]-[16]. It is not only
enough if we only generate make analysis of student
feedback and arrive at conclusion if they denote a
positive or negative feedback. A recommendation
system can be designed in following phases [17].
i. Data selection-The data set here would be
collection of tokens for which the polarity and opinion
extraction is done.
ii. Sentiment analysis on selected dataset-Sentiment
analysis is performed on student feedback which
would categorize it to be either positive or negative.
Lexicon based approach is used, where the polarity
scoring is done between -3 to +3. Then opinion
mining is used to denote if the aspect is weakly
positive, moderately positive, strongly positive,
weakly negative, moderately negative, strongly
negative, neutral [18].
iii. Recommendation for sentiment analyzed
(3) dataset- Recommendation for the student feedback
(4) can be given to tutors by python program for those
aspects which were termed negative by opinion
mining as shown in Fig. 2.
 Algorithm: Analysis and Recommendation system of sentiments showing that half the student do not have
student feedback. any issue with assignments while the rest half are
INPUT: Documents D1, D2 …Dd; finding it difficult. In such situations there maybe
OUTPUT: Indication of alteration in required aspects. possibilities that it may detoriate furthermore if proper
attention is not given to it. So there will be an
Step 1: Choose documentsD1, D2…, Dm.
indication of alteration required in cases when there is
Step 2: Apply LDA to the document generated
equal positive and negative score. This methodology
Zn~Multinomial(ߠ)
will have significant impact in improving teaching-
Step 3: Find polarity of aspects[-3<P<3]
learning session.
P=σே
௜ୀଵ ܲܶ‫݅ݏ‬Ȁܰ
Step 4: if (P<0) then
Suggest ‘Alter the teaching technique’.
else if( P>0) then
Suggest ‘Continue the existing teaching
Technique ‘.

Fig. 3. Plot of negative and positive sentiment count against aspects

in theoretical subject for one semester.

Fig. 2. Proposed recommendation system

V. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
The ideology proposed can be used to identify the
opinion or views of student regarding the course. For
instance, feedback comments for theoretical subject
from 80 students are taken to identify if they denote a
positive or negative note [19]. Fig. 3 and 4 shows the
comparison between Samuel C Nelson model and
proposed model. The feedback generated for
theoretical subject across one entire semester is shown
in Fig. 3. The plots show the representation of the
aspects. Six keywords were extracted which denote
the six topics in the student feedback. For instance the
keyword ‘tutorial’ is represented by 50 students in
positive sense and 10 students in negative sense. So
the majority of students are content with ‘tutorial’
hence the tutors are recommended to continue with
teaching technique. We could also infer from fig. 3,
that about 35% students are not happy with the
syllabus given to them for the course. This may be a
major hindrance for the improvement in the academic
performance of students. When recommendation
system is implemented there will be an indication in
syllabus aspect stating that it requires modification.
Once the alteration is implemented in teaching
technique after recommendation, the feedback is
again obtained from students and changes could be
notified where the opinion in syllabus turned out to be
in positive note. From the Fig. 4, we could see that
‘assignment’ has gained equal positive and negative
Fig. 4. Plot of equal negative and positive sentiment count for one
aspects in theoretical subject for one semester.
VI. CONCLUSION
To witness a successful teaching-learning session it
is necessary to have two-way communication so that
expectations from both the ends could be met. It is not
an easy task for the tutors to read each and every
student feedback. To overcome such issue every
student feedback is analyzed using sentiment analysis.
The main objective of such estimation is to know if
the teaching learning session is productive or not.
Based on the analysis the recommendation system
will provide tutors an indication on the areas of
alterations need. An important contribution of this
work is that it will provide an automatic
recommendation system once the opinion is
generated. In case the aspect was categorized negative
by opinion mining then the recommendation system

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 would indicate alterations required in that particular
aspect. The advantage of such systems is that quick
comparisons can be done on the whole even with
large amounts of student feedback.
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