Emotag - Towards an emotion-based analysis of emojis

Abstract

Despite being a fairly recent phenomenon, emojis have quickly become ubiquitous. Besides their extensive use in social media, they are now also invoked in customer surveys and feedback forms. Hence, there is a need for techniques to understand their sentiment and emotion. In this work, we provide a method to quantify the emotional association of basic emotions such as anger, fear, joy, and sadness for a set of emojis. We collect and process a unique corpus of 20 million emoji-centric tweets, such that we can capture rich emoji semantics using a comparably small dataset. We evaluate the induced emotion profiles of emojis with regard to their ability to predict word affect intensities as well as sentiment scores.