The Effects of Emoji in Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

This study investigates the usage of Emoji characters on social networks and the effects of Emoji in text mining and sentiment analysis. As it provides live access to text based public opinions, we chose Twitter as our information source in our analysis. We collected text data for some global positive and negative events to analyze the impact of Emoji characters in sentiment analysis. In our analysis, we noticed that the utilization of Emoji characters in sentiment analysis results in higher sentiment scores. Furthermore, we observed that the usage of Emoji characters in sentiment analysis appeared to have higher impact on overall sentiments of the positive opinions in comparison to the negative opinions.