:telephone::person::sailboat::whale::okhand:; or "Call me Ishmael" - How do you translate emoji?

11/07/2016

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by   Will Radford, et al.

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We report on an exploratory analysis of Emoji Dick, a project that leverages crowdsourcing to translate Melville's Moby Dick into emoji. This distinctive use of emoji removes textual context, and leads to a varying translation quality. In this paper, we use statistical word alignment and part-of-speech tagging to explore how people use emoji. Despite these simple methods, we observed differences in token and part-of-speech distributions. Experiments also suggest that semantics are preserved in the translation, and repetition is more common in emoji.