Predicting Adolescents’ Educational Track from Chat Messages on Dutch Social Media

AbstractWe aim to predict Flemish adolescents’ educational track based on their Dutch social media writing. We distinguish between the three main types of Belgian secondary education: General (theory-oriented), Vocational (practice-oriented), and Technical Secondary Education (hybrid). The best results are obtained with a Naive Bayes model, i.e. an F-score of 0.68 (std. dev. 0.05) in 10-fold cross-validation experiments on the training data and an F-score of 0.60 on unseen data. Many of the most informative features are character n-grams containing specific occurrences of chatspeak phenomena such as emoticons. While the detection of the most theory- and practice-oriented educational tracks seems to be a relatively easy task, the hybrid Technical level appears to be much harder to capture based on online writing style, as expected.