Sentiment Analysis of Social Media for Evaluating Universities

Abstract

In the age of digitalization, a huge amount of sentiments are expressed daily on university related topics using social media platforms. Particularly, posted statements from students and teachers can provide a potential source for evaluating universities. Twitter as one of the most popular microblogging platforms is a rich data resource for opinion mining. Stimulated by this fact, ways to analyze Twitter for information in the context of universities are sought. This paper looks at the analysis of social media sentiment as a complementary source for evaluating universities. The extracted results can support university rankings that experience criticism in terms ofmeasuring vital indicators. This paper relays on sentiment analysis methods to analyze opinions published on Twitter. For this purpose, at first, tweets that are related to selected universities in Germany were collected. Second, the tweets were classified based on their sentiment into “Positive” and “Not Positive” tweets. At last, the results were analyzed providing information about the communicative topics at the universities. This paper gives an outlook to further research in context of an automated analysis of social media content in order to support the evaluation of universities.