Opinion mining and emotion recognition applied to learning environments

This paper presents a comparison among several sentiment analysis classifiers using three different techniques - machine learning, deep learning, and an evolutionary approach called EvoMSA - for the classification of educational opinions in an Intelligent Learning Environment called ILE-Java. To make this comparison, we develop two corpora of expressions into the programming languages domain, which reflect the emotional state of students regarding teachers, exams, homework, and academic projects, among others. A corpus called sentiTEXT has polarity (positive and negative) labels, while a corpus called eduSERE has positive and negative learning-centered emotions (engaged, excited, bored, and frustrated) labels. From the experiments carried out with the three techniques, we conclude that the evolutionary algorithm (EvoMSA) generated the best results with an accuracy of 93% for the corpus sentiTEXT, and 84% for the corpus eduSERE. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.