Do you speak Emoji? How we express our emotions

Speak Emoji
Feb 26 2016

After an emoji was voted the word of the year 2015, now we have an app that translates words into emojis. Enter “SpeakEmoji”, currently available only in English. All you have to do is speak into the microphone on your mobile phone and watch the words translate into emojis. Then, of course, you can share the results on your social media platform of choice. The recipient is able to convert your message back into text, and reply in turn with their own emoji message.

The brainchild of SapientNitro, the app was created with the aim of helping parents and adults communicate with their generation-smartphone children, who have made the art of communicating through symbols their own. The app acts as an interpreter for this emerging universal language, a revolution in terms of the way we communicate, made possible by technology.

Researchers in Slovenia have recently come up with a sentiment lexicon and map, by studying the emojis used in 70,000 tweets in 13 European languages. Will these emotions become the new language of the future, independent of culture? Will textual communication be replaced by pictographs?

They say words are not enough, that a picture speaks a thousand words, but are we sure that we really want to regress to this primitive form of expression to communicate our sentiments and emotions? What is more personal, intimate and deep than the contents of our mind and soul? Does an emoji, a standardised representation of emotion that is the same for everyone, really suffice to express how we feel?

Even defining emotions themselves remains a thorny issue. While for some our emotions are innate to our very biological being, universal for all humankind and demonstrable through facial expressions, for others the very definition of what an emotion is remains unclear.

In any case, analysing sentiments and the computational study of opinions, sentiments, emotions and human behaviour is one of the most active research areas in the field of natural language processing and in data-, web- and text-mining studies.

One thing, however, is for sure: we will continue to hear talk of emojis as words, images and emotions, the statistics behind how we interact and communicate with other people and the web.

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