Sentiment Perception of Readers and Writers in Emoji use

Previous research has traditionally analyzed emoji sentiment from the point of view of the reader of the content not the author. Here, we analyze emoji sentiment from the point of view of the author and present a emoji sentiment benchmark that was built from an employee happiness dataset where emoji happen to be annotated with daily happiness of the author of the comment. The data spans over 3 years, and 4k employees of 56 companies based in Barcelona. We compare sentiment of writers to readers. Results indicate that, there is an 82% agreement in how emoji sentiment is perceived by readers and writers. Finally, we report that when authors use emoji they report higher levels of happiness. Emoji use was not found to be correlated with differences in author moodiness.