A Correlation between Sentiment Expression and Writing Level of High School Student’s Persuasive Text

Objectives In this study, the problem was that the current writing evaluation did not take into account the emotional level of student writing. In order to examine the correlation between the sentiment level of high school students' editorial text and the level of writing, an persuasive sentiment lexicon was prepared, the sentiment level was measured, and the correlation between the sentiment level and the evaluation score was analyzed. Methods A corpus was created by collecting 132 student essays on two subjects, and the emotional dictionary of the corpus was constructed by determining the emotional level of the vocabulary as the expert's rating. By measuring the emotional level with the editorial sentiment dictionary, the correlation with the writing evaluation score was examined, and specifically, it was confirmed whether there was a difference in the correlation according to the upper/lower level. Results In both the KNU sentiment dictionary and the editorial sentiment dictionary, the degree of emotion and the evaluation score were positively correlated, and the correlation degree of the editorial sentiment dictionary (0.543) was higher than the KNU sentiment dictionary (0.368). Although the degree of correlation was different for each topic, both the emotional level and the writing level showed a positive correlation, especially the number of positive and negative words and the highest correlation. As a result of examining the texts by dividing them into upper, middle and lower levels, the correlation between the lower level text and the emotional level was high (0.571), and the upper level had no significant correlation with the emotional level. Conclusions It was found that the higher the emotional level of the editorial text, the higher the writing level, and the lower-level writing had a higher correlation with the emotional level. It was confirmed that it is necessary to use emotional words appropriately in order to effectively convey one's argument to the other party, rather than exclude the degree of emotion from the editorial text. For students with low writing ability, since the amount of words has a great influence on their writing level, it is necessary to learn various words including emotional words.