Are Emojis Emotional? A Study to Understand the Association between Emojis and Emotions
This addresses the need for methods to interpret emojis' emotional meaning in digital communication, but it is incremental as it builds on existing data and focuses on a specific domain.
The paper tackled the problem of understanding how emojis convey emotions by creating a new dataset of human-solicited association ratings and testing if these associations can be predicted from existing data. The result showed that prediction succeeds when high-quality word-level information is available.
Given the growing ubiquity of emojis in language, there is a need for methods and resources that shed light on their meaning and communicative role. One conspicuous aspect of emojis is their use to convey affect in ways that may otherwise be non-trivial to achieve. In this paper, we seek to explore the connection between emojis and emotions by means of a new dataset consisting of human-solicited association ratings. We additionally conduct experiments to assess to what extent such associations can be inferred from existing data, such that similar associations can be predicted for a larger set of emojis. Our experiments show that this succeeds when high-quality word-level information is available.