Sentiment Analysis for Education with R: packages, methods and practical applications

Sentiment Analysis (SA) refers to a family of techniques at the crossroads ofstatistics, natural language processing, and computational linguistics. Theprimary goal is to detect the semantic orientation of individual opinions andcomments expressed in written texts. There are several practical applicationsof SA in several domains. In an educational context, the use of this approachallows processing students' feedback, aiming at monitoring the teachingeffectiveness of instructors and enhancing the learning experience. This paperwants to review the different R packages that can be used to carry on SA,comparing the implemented methods, discussing their characteristics, andshowing how they perform by considering a simple example.