Comparing pre-trained and fine-tuned transformer-based models for sentiment analysis in Turkish comments in student surveys

Student surveys are essential for evaluating teaching quality and course content, but analyzing open-ended responses is challenging due to their unstructured and multilingual nature. This study applies sentiment analysis to Turkish educational survey responses using three transformer-based models: SAVASY, DBMDZ BERT Base Turkish Cased, and XLM-RoBERTa Base. A labeled dataset of real-world student comments was used, with sentiment labels assigned using the Gemini AI tool to facilitate model fine-tuning. Evaluation metrics included accuracy, F1-score, precision, recall, and confidence scores. Results show that fine-tuning improves sentiment classification, effectively identifying positive, negative, and neutral sentiments. This highlights the value of transformer models in analyzing Turkish student feedback.