Sentiment analysis of students' perception on the use of smartphones: A cross sectional study

Emotions have a great impact in the learning outcome of university students. Since students feel differently about mobile electronic devices that aid or hamper their academic progress, there is the need to unceasingly investigate emotions expressed by students as regard these devices. This paper presents preliminary results of a study conducted to investigate the impact of smartphones on students' academic progress in connection to three (3) factors (gender, level of students, and students' phone usage). This was achieved by examining the sentiments expressed by students through written text by applying four (4) open source lexical resources namely Harvard general inquirer Bing Liu's Opinion Lexicon, MPQA subjectivity lexicon and AFINN affective lexicon. Experiments were carried out on 358 students written text using the prior mentioned lexicons and results show that there is a strong relationship between students' sentiments and the factors considered, as some group of students are associated with more positive comments than others. Our results are subject to verification by a more representative sample, as this is an early step into the study using Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria - Nigeria as case study.