Emoji Composition

The project began when Yisong, intrigued by the Emoji Mashup Bot, explored the question: Can emojis be composed to convey meanings like English phrases? With the support of his advisor, Prof. Min, he recruited an undergraduate student, Zi Yun Yang, to collaborate on the project. Ms. Yang built an annotation platform to collect emoji compositions and their corresponding English phrases from her peers. After her graduation, Yisong and the team added another layer of annotation on composition types and formalized an emoji-based textual entailment task (EmoTE).

The first iteration of this work was published at LREC-COLING 2024. Prof. Min was not listed as an author due to his role as a conference chair, but this project cannot be finished without his guidance. The project continues to gain interest, particularly among undergraduates, with many students from our local NLP course using the emoji dataset for their final projects.