Lexical based automated teaching evaluation via students’ short reviews

Student evaluations of teaching (SET) have become a popular approach to assess faculties’ teaching. Question-score-based questionnaire is the most common SET measure adopted in universities. However, it fails to cover important facets of teaching process that not mentioned in the predefined questionnaire, which can be substantially obtained from students’ short reviews. In this paper, we propose two lexical-based methods, specifically knowledge-based and machine learning-based, to automatically extract opinions from short reviews. Furthermore, the diversity of reviews’ themes and styles of same sentiment polarity reviews can be observed from the extracted opinion results. The experimental results show that the proposed methods are able to achieve accuracies of 78.13 and 84.78%, respectively in the task of student review sentiment classification. Further investigation on linguistic features shows that reviews with same sentiment polarity shares similar language patterns. Finally, we present an application scenario in real SET process by utilizing aforementioned methods and discoveries.