E moji C loud: a Tool for Emoji Cloud Visualization (2022)

Abstract: This paper proposes EmojiCloud, an open-source Python-based emoji cloud visualization tool, to generate a quick and straightforward understanding of emojis from the perspective of frequency and importance. EmojiCloud is flexible enough to support diverse drawing shapes, such as rectangles, ellipses, and image masked canvases. We also follow inclusive and personalized design principles to cover the unique emoji designs from seven emoji vendors (e.g., Twitter, Apple, and Windows) and allow users to customize plotted emojis and background colors. We hope EmojiCloud can benefit the whole emoji community due to its flexibility, inclusiveness, and customizability.

## introduction and background emojis play a significant role in social business listening, sentiment analysis, cross-language communication, and politics. people from different language and cultural backgrounds love emojis and use them very frequently. according to a recent survey @xcite , almost everyone online had experience in using emojis. it is important to generate a fast and straightforward understanding of emojis in many research and applications. inspired by the word cloud @xcite , which has be adopted as an effective way to visualize the frequency and importance of words in text mining, we thought the word cloud of emojis seemed to be a good solution. however, as shown in figure 1 , the word cloud will change and modify emojis' original and important features, such as colors ( ), directionalities ( ), and textures ( ). these inaccurate emoji representations may lead to misunderstanding. for example, when emojis are upside down, they turn into that conveys different sentiments and meanings. also, miscolored emojis such as may cause the problem of personal identity representations. in addition, the word cloud of emojis fails to capture the diversity of emoji appearances customized by emoji vendors. as different emoji renderings across viewing platforms may cause communication errors and diverse interpretations @xcite , it is very important to support vendor-wise emoji visualization. although several online platforms, such as talkwalker foot_0 , slido foot_1 , and poll everywhere foot_2 , offer emoji cloud services for various needs, they are not open-source and fail to provide apis or functions for flexible usages in text mining. moreover, these services are just targeting one emoji cloud canvas shape and one emoji vendor respectively. in this paper, we design and implement emoji-cloud, a counterpart of the word cloud for emoji visualization. instead of plotting words, emoji-cloud draws emoji images in a clear and cloud-like fashion and keeps all detailed emojis features. emo-jicloud is flexible to support diverse canvases, such as rectangles, ellipses, and image-masked shapes. it also enables users to customize emoji clouds by specifying emoji vendors (e.g., twitter, google, and apple) and individual self-made emoji images when creating emoji clouds. as the first opensource python-based emoji cloud visualization tool (to our best knowledge), emojicloud facilitates the understanding of emojis and will bring broader impacts of emojis in many domains. we believe it is a valuable and important tool to the emoji community and even the text mining community. ## emojicloud design & implementation this section presents emoji image preparation, emojicloud layout designs, and implementation. ## emojicloud evaluation in this section, we demonstrate that emojicloud is able to support diverse canvas shapes, different emoji vendors, and customized emoji images. ## conclusion and future work we propose and develop open-source emojicloud to visualize a cluster of emojis according to associated frequency weights. emojicloud enables a novel and informative way to investigate emojis in natural language processing and text mining. we think emojicloud will benefit the whole emoji community due to its flexibility, inclusiveness, and customizability. in the future, we will keep updating the opensource emojicloud based on the users' feedback, such as adding new functions and covering more emoji vendors. to further improve the flexibility and convenience of emojicloud, we will provide an online emojicloud service via www. emojicloud.org . in addition, we will explore the possibility of merging words and emojis in a unified word-emoji cloud.