Sentiment mining in a collaborative learning environment: capitalising on big data

The ability to exploit students’ sentiments using different machine learning techniques is considered an important strategy for planning and manoeuvring in a collaborative educational environment. The advancement of machine learning technology is energised by the healthy growth of big data technologies. This helps the applications based on Sentiment Mining (SM) using big data to become a common platform for data mining activities. However, very little has been studied on the sentiment application using a huge amount of available educational data. Therefore, this paper has made an attempt to mine the academic data using different efficient machine learning algorithms. The contribution of this paper is two-fold: (i) studying the sentiment polarity (positive, negative and neutral) from students’ data using machine learning techniques, and (ii) modelling and predicting students’ emotions (Amused, Anxiety, Bored, Confused, Enthused, Excited, Frustrated, etc.) using the big data frameworks. The developed SM techniques using big data frameworks can be scaled and made adaptable for source variation, velocity and veracity to maximise value mining for the benefit of students, faculties and other stakeholders.