Emoji Prediction Using Bi-Directional LSTM

School of Computer Science and Engineering, KLE Technological University, Hubballi (Karnataka), 580031, India

^* Corresponding author: vskonenpn@gmail.com

Abstract

Messengers and social media dominate today’s internet usage across the globe. For the large population, a typical day starts with messages flooding on mobiles, from simple good morning wishes, business meeting invites, reminders, and schedules for the day and the list is endless. A striking feature of today’s digital communication is the variety of emojis used, without which text communication almost look incomplete. Emojis are graphic symbols/logograms used with text communication to enhance the effectiveness of emotions and set an undertone that makes texting a more fun experience for the users. Emojis are the visual language of the new generation. They give consumers a means to communicate their feelings while reducing the quantity of text that needs to be typed by the sender. Every social media and messenger platform like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, and many more have its own emoji set. To lure more and more users, many new emojis are added day by day. Predicting and suggesting emojis based on the text, emotion and user patterns to the user is an important feature of today’s messengers and social media applications. If you start typing a message, relevant emojis will be displayed from which users can choose an emoji, further enhancing the user texting experience. This process is done using natural language processing and machine learning techniques. In this paper, we study emoji prediction techniques and propose an emoji prediction model using bi-directional LSTMs. We compare emoji prediction NLP techniques, including RNN, LSTM, LSTM networks, and Bi-LSTM. Based on our implementation, we suggest that the bi-directional LSTM model is the most effective technique. Our model outperforms many baseline approaches with an accuracy of 94% when tested on a CodaLab Twitter data set with 60000 rows and two columns. Our study shows the effectiveness and efficiency of bi-directional LSTMs for text-based systems for communication.