Emojional: Emoji Embeddings

Emojis are intended to illustrate or replace words in natural language. Although they are understandable across linguistic barriers, their implications are ever-evolving, and change depending on who we are talking to, and when. The underlying emotion is key. This is evident in language online, highlighted recently by the rise of cancel culture via online shaming. For example, the use of the clown emoji to signify someone is making a fool of themself, or the collective spamming of the snake emoji to “cancel” someone, both show seemingly innocent emojis being used as clear forms of aggression online. To capture these nuances, we have created novel emoji embeddings trained on their emotional content. The subsequent emoji embeddings are generally more accurate than the state-of-the-art embeddings on the task of sentiment analysis. These embeddings can be found in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/elenabarry/emojional.