*It's mighty interesting when you have a pictogram dialect caught in a platform-as-fishbowl.
In October 2011, Apple added the emoji keyboard to iOS as an international keyboard. Since then, digital language has evolved such that nearly half of comments and captions on Instagram contain emoji characters. And earlier this week, Instagram also added support for emoji characters in hashtags, which allows people to tag and search content with their favorite emoji #.
In Part 1 of this blog post series, we will take a deep dive into emoji usage on Instagram. By applying machine learning and natural language processing techniques, we’ll discover the hidden semantics of emoji.
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Emoji Translations
Having learned a good representation for emoji, we can begin to ask questions about similarity. Namely, for a given emoji, what English words are semantically similar? For each emoji, we compute the “angle” (equivalently the cosine similarity) between it and other words. Words with a small angle are said to be similar and provide a natural, English-language translation for that emoji.
Using our algorithm, we find that many of our popular emoji have meanings in-line with early internet slang:
(ranked 1st in emoji usage): lolol, lmao, lololol, lolz, lmfao, lmaoo, lolololol, lol, ahahah, ahahha, loll, ahaha, ahah, lmfaoo, ahha, lmaooo, lolll, lollll, ahahaha, ahhaha, lml, lmfaooo
(ranked 2nd in emoji usage): beautifull, gawgeous, gorgeous, perfff, georgous, gorgous, hottt, goregous, cuteeee, beautifullll, georgeous, baeeeee, hotttt, babeee, sexyyyy, perffff, hawttt
❤ (ranked 3rd in emoji usage): xoxoxox, xoxoxo, xoxo, xoxoxoxo, xoxoxoxoxo, xoxoxoxox, xxoo, oxox, babycakes, muahhhh, mwahh, babe, boobear, loveyou, bunches, muahhh, muahh, xoxox, muahhhhh
(ranked 9th in emoji usage): #keepitup, #fingerscrossed, aswell, haha, #impressed, #yourock, lol, #greatjob, bud, #goodjob, awesome, good, #muchlove, #proudofyou, job, #goodluck
(ranked 11th in emoji usage): ughh, ughhh, ughhhh, ugh, uggh, ugghh, ughhhhh, ughhhhhh, ugggh, lolol, wahhhh, rn, oml, uhg, agh, xc, omgg, omfg, omf, lololol, whyyy, loll, wahhhhh, tooo, kms
Some of the more distinctive emoji had particularly distinctive meanings:
: #waitonit, #justwaitonit, #wonthedoit, #nuffsaid, #yeslawd, #youtherealmvp, #stayblessed, #thatisall, thou, #enoughsaid, leggo, #onlythebeginning
: #sistasista, #sistersforlife, #sistersister, #bestiesforlife, yearsoffriendship, #sisterfromanothermister, #morelikesisters, #bffl, #bestiesfortheresties, #bestfriendsforever
: #birthdaybehavior, #bdaybehavior, #tu, #ladiesnight, #turnuptime, #dontmissit, #bdaycelebration, #piscesseason, #bethere, turnup, #grownandsexy
: merry, christmas, #merrychristmas, #christmas2014, #christmaseve, #christmastime, xmas, eve, #santa, claus, #happyholidays, #xmas, clause, reindeer, pesach
