- Miaomiao Wen, Diyi Yang, C. Rosé. 2014. Sentiment Analysis in MOOC Discussion Forums: What does it tell us?. Abstract: Sentiment analysis is one of the great accomplishments of the last decade in the field of Language Technologies. In this paper, we explore mining collective sentiment from forum posts in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in order to monitor students’ trending opinions towards the course and major course tools, such as lecture and peer-assessment. We observe a correlation between sentiment ratio measured based on daily forum posts and number of students who drop out each day. On a user-level, we evaluate the impact of sentiment on attrition over time. A qualitative analysis clarifies the subtle differences in how these language behaviors are used in practice across three MOOCs. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
