Closeness Analysis of Students' Word-Usage Located in a High-Dimensional Space

Abstract

As a part of our studies in investigating the relations between university students' performances and their attitudes to learning, we propose a new method of representing word-usage profiles of students by embedding the word-usage vectors into a high-dimensional Euclidean space in this paper. The original source of data are the answer texts of students for a term-end evaluation questionnaire in a university class. By analyzing the relations in a couple of layouts of the word-vectors that are supposed to represent a kind of attitudes of students, we intend to find some kinds of relations between word-usages and academic achievements of students. The major achievements of this paper include (1) to investigate the relations of students' word-usages themselves as well as (2) to develop new methods that clarify the differences of students in terms of their viewpoint in comparison with their achievements through these layouts.