Abstract
As part of continuous process improvements to teaching and learning, the management of tertiary institutions requests students to review modules towards the end of each semester. These reviews capture students' perceptions about various aspects of their learning experience. Considering the large volume of textual feedback, it is not feasible to manually analyze all the comments, hence the need for automated approaches. This study presents a framework for analyzing students' qualitative reviews. The framework consists of four distinct components: aspect-term extraction, aspect-category identification, sentiment polarity determination, and grades' prediction. We evaluated the framework with the dataset from the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR). A sample size of 1,111 reviews was used. A microaverage F1-score of 0.67 was achieved using Bi- LSTM-CRF and BIO tagging scheme for aspect-term extraction. Twelve aspect categories were then defined for the education domain and four variants of RNNs models (GRU, LSTM, Bi-LSTM, and Bi-GRU) were compared. A Bi-GRU model was developed for sentiment polarity determination and the model achieved a weighted F1-score of 0.96 for sentiment analysis. Finally, a Bi-LSTM-ANN model which combined textual and numerical features was implemented to predict students' grades based on the reviews. A weighted F1-score of 0.59 was obtained, and out of 29 students with "F" grade, 20 were correctly identified by the model.