EmoTag1200: Understanding the Association between Emojis and Emotions

Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8957–8967, November 16–20, 2020. c⃝2020 Association for Computational Linguistics 8957 EmoTag1200 : Understanding the Association between Emojis and Emotions Abu Awal Md Shoeb Dept. of Computer Science Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ, USA abu.shoeb@rutgers.edu Gerard de Melo Hasso Plattner Institute University of Potsdam Potsdam, Germany gdm@demelo.org Abstract Given the growing ubiquity of emojis in lan- guage, there is a need for methods and re- sources 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 connec- tion between emojis and emotions by means of a new dataset consisting of human-solicited as- sociation ratings. We additionally conduct ex- periments to assess to what extent such associ- ations can be inferred from existing data in an unsupervised manner. Our experiments show that this succeeds when high-quality word- level information is available. 1 Introduction People increasingly rely on digital channels such as mobile instant messaging apps to communicate with their friends, families, colleagues, and commu- nities. Along with this rapid shift in medium, there have been concomitant changes in the way people express themselves in written language (McCul- loch, 2019). One notable development has been the emergence of emojis as a new modality, presenting rich possibilities for representation and interaction. Emojis have become ubiquitous in social media and in instant messaging, owing in part to their visual appeal and their ease of use compared to typing out full words on mobile devices. However, the rise of emojis also substantially ap- pears to stem from their ability to convey affect (Vi- dal et al., 2016; Zhou et al., 2017). This is evinced by the fact that the most frequently used emojis are smileys and other facial expression symbols that exhibit a direct connection to emotional ex- pression (Ekman and Friesen, 1986). These largely displaced traditional emoticons such as “:-)” and “:)”, which as well were chiefly used to convey humor and emotion (Derks et al., 2008), as also reflected in their name, a portmanteau of the words emotion and icon. This mandates additional analysis of the nexus between emojis and emotion. Past work has com- piled a list of sentiment polarity scores for a set of emojis (Novak et al., 2015). Rakhmetullina et al. (2018) categorized a set of 15 emojis into 4 dif- ferent emotion classes, while Li et al. (2019) used a lexicon-based heuristic to compare connections between emojis and emotions in social media data. Several studies have explored the linguistic con- nection between words and emojis (Cappallo et al., 2019; Barbieri et al., 2017; Na’aman et al., 2017; Shoeb et al., 2019). However, previous work has not assessed to what extent humans associate par- ticular emotions with different emojis. In this work, we present EmoTag1200, a dataset of human ratings of association for a set of 150 popular emojis with regard …

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