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Did That Help? Harnessing Natural Language Processing To Uncover Characteristics Of Peer Feedback And Their Impacts On Teamwork-Skills Learning., Annamaria V. Wolf

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Peer Evaluation Systems (PESs) allow members of student teams to provide one another with computer-mediated feedback in the form of qualitative, open-ended comments. The current research leverages unsupervised Natural Language Processing (NLP), namely Biterm Topic Modeling (BTM) and sentiment analysis, to uncover latent topics and degree of positivity and negativity expressed in peer feedback, respectively. BTM results revealed a 6-topic model that was reliably replicated over 10 Gibbs initializations 80% of the time. Topics were labeled Timely Communication, Idea Generation, Coordination & Adaptation, Work Quality, Team Support & Focusing, and Work Accountability. Qualitative comparison suggests that these topics demonstrate …