Incorporating Emoji Descriptions Improves Tweet Classification

AbstractTweets are short messages that often include specialized language such as hashtags and emojis. In this paper, we present a simple strategy to process emojis: replace them with their natural language description and use pretrained word embeddings as normally done with standard words. We show that this strategy is more effective than using pretrained emoji embeddings for tweet classification. Specifically, we obtain new state-of-the-art results in irony detection and sentiment analysis despite our neural network is simpler than previous proposals.