Empirical application of sentiment analysis and emotions in Spanish: A post-cognitivist approach

Abstract

Text mining has led to growth in sentiment analysis (SA) across various research disciplines. The pandemic has provided a unique and special context for analysing students’ written expression. We utilised comments from a survey conducted during the pandemic to create a corpus for SA. The corpus comprises 25,197 words extracted from over 600 comments in Spanish, collected during a survey that lasted around 20 days. We aim to detect sentiments and emotions from this corpus using SA. However, some essential and little-discussed issues in literature should be addressed, such as its relationship with post-cognitivist theory. This paper uses the post-cognitivist approach to analyse emotions and sentiments through SA with the Spanish lexicon in the economics of education. Literature in this area needs further development, especially in Spanish. The article shows that the emotions and sentiments of students in challenging situations can be identified through a corpus of student comments. However, specific elements should be considered while interpreting emotions and sentiments within the framework of post-cognitivism methodologies. Recognising that the human experience is a complex interaction, it is essential to consider the emotional nuances within the context in which they develop. Addressing this issue from the post-cognitivist approach is one of several ways to carry out this task. Using SA and emotions to analyse a text corpus is still helpful for researchers who follow the post-cognitivist approach. However, combining this technique with other qualitative and in-depth computational methods is essential to fully understanding the emotional experiences within their respective contexts.