Aspect-based sentiment analysis in MOOCs: a systematic literature review introducing the MASC-MEF framework

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) in massive open online courses (MOOCs) offers a powerful tool to understand student experiences and improve the quality of online education. As MOOCs grow in popularity, there is an increasing need to analyze student feedback at a granular level, focusing on specific course aspects rather than just overall sentiment. Despite ABSA’s potential in MOOCs, research in this specific domain remains limited. Thus, this review of the literature seeks to fill this gap by systematically examining ABSA within the realm of MOOCs. We utilized a PRISMA framework to guide the search process. Consequently, this review covered 57 studies conducted between 2019 and 2024, retrieved from eight electronic research databases. The studies included in this analysis were examined on the basis of their datasets, data preprocessing, ABSA tasks in MOOCs, evaluation aspects in online courses, fusion approach in ABSA, techniques of word representations, and evaluation criteria utilized to evaluate the proposed models. Additionally, this review introduces the multiaspect sentiment classification using multiembedding and fusion (MASC-MEF) framework, a novel approach that uniquely incorporates multiword embeddings and multifeature extraction along with advanced classification techniques. Results shed light on several critical issues and various limitations, pointing towards future directions for ABSA research within the realm of MOOCs. This review underscores significant contributions to improving ABSA in educational technology, with a focus on course effectiveness and advancements in online learning, guiding researchers towards innovative techniques to tackle this challenge in the future.