Trends in NLP for personalized learning: LDA and sentiment analysis insights

Abstract

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the major themes in Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications for personalized learning, derived from a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) examination of top educational technology journals from 2014 to 2023. Our methodology involved collecting a corpus of relevant journal articles, applying LDA for thematic extraction, and conducting sentiment analysis on the identified themes. Four predominant themes have been identified: Emotionally Intelligent NLP for Enhanced Writing Education, Interactive Conversational Tutors, Semantic and Sentiment Analysis in Video-based Learning, and Algorithmic Personalization in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The study highlights the growing importance of emotional intelligence in NLP, the development of AI-powered conversational tutors, and the strategic use of NLP to extract insights from multimedia content. Moreover, the study reveals a uniformly positive sentiment towards NLP’s potential in education, despite the challenges and a need for ethical considerations. No significant sentiment variances were found across the four themes, indicating a consensus on NLP’s value in diverse educational applications. This research supports the sentiment of ongoing innovation within NLP to enhance personalized learning experiences and suggests a promising future for its empirical validation and application in educational settings.