Unity in Diversity: Multilabel Emoji Identification in Tweets

Emojis or emoticons are not just a modern trend but have become an essential part of our day-to-day interactions. Predicting a suitable emoji for a given tweet is a challenging task because a wrong emoji prediction for a tweet can change the meaning of the message or can amplify the emotion of the message. This task is particularly challenging since it requires selecting an appropriate emoji from a huge list of prospective emojis that may or may not be equivalent to one another. Humans use multiple emojis to convey their emotions, thereby making the task a multilabel classification problem. In this article, we propose a multilabel emoji prediction system that predicts the appropriate emoji for a given tweet by using different state-of-the-art baselines. Due to the unavailability of a multi-emoji dataset, we create a large-scale multilabel emoji dataset named Mu-Emoji that comprises of more than 0.6 million tweets having varied emojis belonging to both positive and negative sentiments. For our proposed task, we employ graph attention network along with bidirectional encoder representations from transformer encoder for the accurate prediction of emojis. Qualitative and quantitative analyses show that our multilabel emoji prediction baselines perform well compared with the single-emoji prediction baselines for our proposed Mu-Emoji dataset. Our proposed framework also outperforms all the baselines for both single and multilabel emoji prediction tasks.