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

Sentiment Analysis (SA) refers to a family of techniques at the crossroads of statistics, natural language processing, and computational linguistics. The primary goal is to detect the semantic orientation of individual opinions and comments expressed in written texts. There are several practical applications of SA in several domains. In an educational context, the use of this approach allows processing students' feedback, aiming at monitoring the teaching effectiveness of instructors and enhancing the learning experience. This paper wants to review the different R packages that can be used to carry on SA, comparing the implemented methods, discussing their characteristics, and showing how they perform by considering a simple example.