Sentiment of EmojiSets: How Emoji Sequences Improve Sentiment Cognition

ABSTRACT

The capability to infer emotional insights from emojis found in social media has projected emoji analysis into the spotlight of current emoji-based research. Previous studies mainly used text-surrounding emojis to estimate sentimentality scores. However, trying to conclude the same score based solely on emojis is challenging. In this paper this challenge was welcomed, and with it we created a new concept. This revolutionary scoring method, named the EmojiSets Sentiment Score Rank, proposes using sets of emojis taken from tweets along with information from previous studies [1] to find a sentiment score. This bottom-up scoring approach gives each emoji a sentiment score. It then calculates the context-level sentiment score of a tweet solely dependent on the emojis found within it. To the best of the authors' knowledge, no such approach has been researched in the Emojis Sentiment Analysis area. We tested our model against over 1.2 million tweets concerning Covid-19 and compared it to the VADER model [7] to validate our assumption. Our model corrected around 72% of the tweets that the other model scored as neutral. To succor these findings, 32 human annotators were given the task of annotating 8040 randomly chosen tweets. When calculating similarity using the Jaccard Index, their results were consistent with our approach in over 70% of cases © 2022 IEEE.