Automatic Classification of Efl Learners’ Self-Reported Text Documents Along an Affective Continuum

Abstract

This study aims to place EFL learners along an affective continuum via machine learning methods and present a new dataset about affective characteristics of EFL learners. In line with the purposes, written self-reports of 475 students from 5 different faculties in 3 universities in Turkey were collected and manually assigned by the researchers to one of the labels (positive, negative, or neutral). As a result, two combinations of the same dataset (AC-2 and AC-3) including different numbers of classes were used for the assessment of automatic classification approaches. Results revealed that automatic classification confirmed the manual classification to a great extent and machine learning methods could be used to classify EFL students along an affective continuum according to their affective characteristics. Maximum accuracy rate of automatic classification is 90.06% on AC-2 dataset including two classes. Similarly, on AC-3 dataset including three classes, maximum accuracy rate of classification is 71.79%. Last, the top-10 features/words obtained by feature selection methods are highly discriminative in terms of assessing student feelings for EFL learning. It could be stated that there is not an existing study in which feature selection methods and classifiers are used in the literature to automatically classify EFL learners’ feelings.