Rsentiment: A tool to extract meaningful insights from textual reviews

Abstract

Every system needs continuous improvement. Feedback from different stakeholders plays a crucial role here. From literature study, the need of textual feedback analysis for an academic institute is well established. In fact, it has been perceived that often a textual feedback is more informative, more open ended and more effective in producing actionable insights to decision makers as compared to more common score based (on a scale from 1: n) feedback. However, getting this information from textual feedback is not possible through the traditional means of data analysis. Here we have conceptualized a tool, which can apply text mining techniques to elicit insights from textual data and has been published as an open source package for a broader use by practitioners. Appropriate visualization techniques are applied for intuitive understanding of the insights. For this, we have used a real dataset consisting of alumni feedback from a top engineering college in Kolkata.