Understanding Emojis for Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Many people use emojis to express themselves in a more clear and efficient way and the usage of such expressions has grown significantly. In recent years, there have been many research papers that analyze the meanings of individual emojis or show the accuracy of sentiment analysis when emojis are included. However, there is limited research done on understanding how emojis are used to show sentiment and how it affects sentiment analysis. In this paper, we analyze the usage of emojis in Tweets and their effects on the overall sentiment of the Tweet. We also introduce a pre-processing method for emojis that increases the effect of emojis and as a result, improves the sentiment analysis accuracy.