How Shell and Horn make a Unicorn: Experimenting with Visual Blending in Emoji

Authors

Abstract

Emoji are becoming increasingly popular, both among users and brands. Their impact is such that some authors even mention a possible language shift towards visuality. We present a Visual Blending-based system for emoji generation, which is capable of representing concepts introduced by the user. Our approach combines data from ConceptNet, EmojiNet and Twitter’s Twemoji datasets to explore Visual Blending in emoji generation. In order to assess the quality of the system, a user study was conducted. The experimental results show that the system is able to produce new emoji that represent the concepts introduced. According to the participants, the blends are not only visually appealing but also unexpected.

Keywords

Visual Blending, Computational Creativity, Emoji

Conference

Ninth International Conference on Computational Creativity, Salamanca, Spain, June 25-29, 2018. 2018

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