Sentiment Analysis Model to Predict People’s Opinion of the Trimester System in Saudi Arabia
Mashael M. Alsulami · International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology · 2023
The trimester system is a new academic system in the education sector in Saudi Arabia. At the beginning of 2021, the Ministry of Education announced the introduction of the trimester system in general education, aiming to overcome the gap between the actual number of study hours in Saudi Arabia and those in international educational systems. This paper, using the sentiment analysis of Twitter data, investigated people’s opinions about the trimester system. We extracted and conducted a multi-class classification model using several machine learning classifiers to classify each tweet in terms of its sentiment polarity appropriately. Results showed that both Linear Regression and Random Forest classifiers achieved better performance with multi-class models than other classifiers. The analysis results showed a neutral emotional state of most Saudi users regarding the trimester system. This indicates a need to explain the policies and changes regarding this system to people, so they understand this system better. The results of this research could help decision makers to understand the emotional aspects of the trimester system in the Saudi community.