ON THE PROCESSING OF COURSE SURVEY COMMENTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS
HAYDÉE GUILLOT JIMÉNEZ · 2021
The systematic evaluation of a Higher Education Institution (HEI) provides its administration with valuable feedback about several aspects of academic life, such as the reputation of the institution and the individual performance of teachers.In particular, student surveys are a first-hand source of information that help assess teacher performance and course adequacy.The primary goals of this thesis are to create and evaluate sentiment analysis models of students' comments, and strategies to summarize students' comments.The thesis first describes two approaches to classify the polarity of students' comments, that is, whether they are positive, negative, or neutral.The first approach depends on a manually created dictionary that lists terms that represent the sentiment to be detected in the students' comments.The second approach adopts a language representation model, which does not depend on a manually created dictionary, but requires some manually annotated test set.The results indicated that the first approach outperformed a baseline tool, and that the second approach achieved very good performance, even when the set of manually annotated comments is small.The thesis then explores several strategies to summarize a set of comments with similar interpretations.The challenge lies in summarizing a set of small sentences, written by different people, which may convey repeated ideas.As strategies, the thesis tested Market Basket Analysis, Topic Models, Text Similarity, TextRank, and Entailment, adopting a human inspection method to evaluate the results obtained, since traditional text summarization metrics proved inadequate.The results suggest that clustering combined with the centroid-based strategy achieves the best results.