Exploring Emojis for Emotion Recognition in Portuguese Text

Abstract

New forms of communication, like emojis, are frequent today in social media. Having in mind their strong connection with expressed emotions, we exploit emojis towards the creation of a model for emotion recognition in Portuguese. We gather short texts from Twitter and follow a traditional text classification task, where emojis are used as labels. After the process of feature engineering, two types of Naive Bayes and SVM classifiers are trained: one for classifying emotion, based on related emojis; another for predicting emojis. Interesting but debatable results were obtained on the former task, while the latter revealed to be more challenging, mainly due to emoji similarity. Yet, this also suggests that we can rely on them as an alternative to manually labelling emotions.