Sentiment analysis in education research: a review of journal publications

Sentiment analysis (SA) is widespread across all fields and has become one of the most active topics in education research, and there is a growing body of papers published. So far, however, there has been little discussion about comprehensive literature reviews in SA in education. Therefore, this study aims to review the high-qualified scientific literature of SA in education and reveals the future research prospects of SA based on the reviewed papers. After systematically searching five online bibliographic databases, 41 relevant articles were located and included in the study. Results show that most studies focus on higher education, and more studies adopt smaller datasets. SA is actively employed in the learning domain of engineering and technology, and teachers/educators are the primary stakeholders considered of studies. Further, utilizing hybrid approaches for SA research is predominant, more studies have refined the granularity of sentiment categories in education. Finally, four major SA research topics, including designing SA methods/systems, investigating learners’ satisfaction/attitude/concerned topics, evaluating teachers’ teaching performance as well as examining the relationship among sentiment, behavior, performance, and achievement, were identified and discussed deeply. Accordingly, several implications and research issues for SA in education research are provided.