Twitter’s User Opinion About Master and Doctoral Degrees: A Model of Sentiment Comparison

This paper examines the opinion of student candidate about their plan to study further to master degree (S2) and doctoral degree (S3). There is lack of approach in finding public opinion about the interest of student candidate in continuing study to higher level such as master degree or doctoral degree. Through this paper, the Twitter’s user opinions are extracted using certain data mining technique to find out three sentiment types (negative, neutral, and positive) by taking the most dominant type of emotions (i.e., anger, anticipation, love, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, trust). The dataset is divided into two groups of Twitter’s users. Both datasets represent group A those opinion is about continuing study further to master degree versus group B whose continuing to doctoral degree. The groups are then divided into three types of sentiment statements about master degree versus doctoral degree. The first group is their sentiment about continuing study further to master degree with the result: (a) 109 negative tweets, 1683 neutral tweets and 131 positive tweets. For the second group (e.g., student’s sentiments about continuing to doctoral degree), it has results: (a) 421 negative tweets, 7666 neutral tweets and 1805 positive tweets. The data are tested to give accuracy value of 85%. The result of this sentiment analysis is useful as a reference for universities to understand the development of sentiments (opinion) from Twitter’s users and help the institutions to improve their reputation and quality