Assessing COVID-19 Impacts on College Students via Automated Processing of Free-form Text

Ravi Sharma, Sri Divya Pagadala, Pratool Bharti, Sriram Chellappan, Trine Schmidt, Raj Goyal

2021

Abstract

In this paper, we report experimental results on assessing the impact of COVID-19 on college students by processing free-form texts generated by them. By free-form texts, we mean textual entries posted by college students (enrolled in a four year US college) via an app specifically designed to assess and improve their mental health. Using a dataset comprising of more than 9000 textual entries from 1451 students collected over four months (split between pre and post COVID-19), and established NLP techniques, a) we assess how topics of most interest to student change between pre and post COVID-19, and b) we assess the sentiments that students exhibit in each topic between pre and post COVID-19. Our analysis reveals that topics like Education became noticeably less important to students post COVID-19, while Health became much more trending. We also found that across all topics, negative sentiment among students post COVID-19 was much higher compared to pre-COVID-19. We expect our study to have an impact on policy-makers in higher education across several spectra, including college administrators, teachers, parents, and mental health counselors.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Sharma R., Pagadala S., Bharti P., Chellappan S., Schmidt T. and Goyal R. (2021). Assessing COVID-19 Impacts on College Students via Automated Processing of Free-form Text. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2021) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF; ISBN 978-989-758-490-9, SciTePress, pages 459-466. DOI: 10.5220/0010249404590466

in Bibtex Style

@conference{healthinf21,
author={Ravi Sharma and Sri Divya Pagadala and Pratool Bharti and Sriram Chellappan and Trine Schmidt and Raj Goyal},
title={Assessing COVID-19 Impacts on College Students via Automated Processing of Free-form Text},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2021) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF},
year={2021},
pages={459-466},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010249404590466},
isbn={978-989-758-490-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2021) - Volume 5: HEALTHINF
TI - Assessing COVID-19 Impacts on College Students via Automated Processing of Free-form Text
SN - 978-989-758-490-9
AU - Sharma R.
AU - Pagadala S.
AU - Bharti P.
AU - Chellappan S.
AU - Schmidt T.
AU - Goyal R.
PY - 2021
SP - 459
EP - 466
DO - 10.5220/0010249404590466
PB - SciTePress