Emojinator: An emoji generator to represent emotions

In recent years, emojis have become a key part of computer-mediated communication (CMC). This stems from the fact that they act as nonverbal cues which are difficult to convey when communicating using simple text. Just as a picture is worth a thousand words, the same can be said for an emoji. In this paper, we present a creative system, Emojinator, that generates emojis us- ing visual blending to represent a diverse range of emo- tions. Unlike previous emoji generation work, fuzzy logic was incorporated to enable Emojinator to make decisions. A user study was conducted to evaluate the output, along with the creative tripod method to as- sess Emojinator’s creativity. The results from the sur- vey show that for more than half the emojis, at least 50 percent of participants agreed or strongly agreed that the emoji represented the stated emotion. Evaluation through the creative tripod method showed that the sys- tem is skillful and imaginative but could be more appre- ciative. Therefore, further refinement may be needed to make the system more creative. However, the success of this novel approach to emoji creation opens up new directions for future work.