Multifaceted Sentiment Detection System (MSDS) to Avoid Dropout in Virtual Learning Environment using Multi-class Classifiers

Abstract

Sentiment analysis with machine learning plays a vital role in Higher Educational Institutions (HEI) for decision making. Technology-enabled interactions can only be successful when a strong student-teacher link is established, and the emotions of students are clearly comprehended. The paper aims at proposing Multifaceted Sentiment Detection System (MSDS) for detecting sentiments of higher education students participating in virtual learning and to classify the comments posted by them using Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. Present research evaluated a total of n=1590 students’ comments with the presence of three specific multifaceted characteristics each providing 530 comments to perform Sentiment Analysis (SA) for monitoring their sentiments, opinions that facilitate predicting dropout in virtual learning environment (VLE). This begins with the phrase extraction; then data pre-processing techniques namely digits, punctuation marks and stop-words removal, spelling correction, tokenization, lemmatization, n-grams, and POS (Part of Speech) are applied. Texts are vectorized using two feature extraction techniques with count vectorization and TF-IDF metrics and classified with four multiclass supervised ML techniques namely Random Forest, Linear SVC, Multinomial Naive Bayes, and Logistic Regression for multifaceted sentiment classification. Analyzing students’ feedback using sentiment analysis techniques classifies their positive, negative, or even more refined emotions that enables dropout prediction. Experimental results reveal that the highest mean accuracy result for device efficiency, cognitive behavior, technological expertise with cloud learning platform usage were achieved by Logistic Regression with 98.49%, Linear SVC with 93.58% and Linear SVC with 92.08% respectively. Practically, results confirm feasibility for detecting students’ multifaceted behavioral patterns and risk of dropout in VLE.