Lexalytics® Launches Support for Unicode Emoji 11.0

Lexalytics®, the leader in “words-first” machine learning and artificial intelligence, announced today support for Emoji 11.0, a set of 157 new emojis from the Unicode Consortium, the governing body that determines the emojis that consumers use worldwide on their devices. With this support, social media marketers, researchers, data scientists, analysts and other Lexalytics’ customers will be able to use the company’s AI-based text analytics platform to immediately gain insights when consumers use the new emojis across social media, email, survey responses and any other form of digital text communication.
“Last year we added an emoji-picker to our Publish and Engage products and it has quickly become one of our customers’ most beloved features,” said Mikael Lemberg, Director of Product Ecosystem at Falcon.io, a leading social media and customer experience SaaS platform. “Emojis have become a critical part of everyday communication, and we’ll need the ability to process and analyze the new Emoji 11.0 the day they hit the market. What’s great about working with Lexalytics is that we know the capability will already be seamlessly built into their platform so we don’t have to worry about missing out on key insights for our customers.”
Lexalytics uses an innovative, hybrid approach to text analytics, combining machine learning with rules and code. Older systems that are solely machine learning based require historical data and markup time in order to train the system, whereas Lexalytics’ solution allows for direct tuning, which is immediate and can be implemented ahead of time, saving hundreds of hours of time in understanding these entirely new emoji “words.”
“Since their birth in the early ’80s, emoticons–and now emojis–have long been used as sentiment markers to help people more effectively communicate in the digital world,” said Jeff Catlin, CEO of Lexalytics. “In order to understand the full scope of what people are saying and feeling about a particular product, brand or service, emojis are becoming just as critical as standard text for our enterprise customers.”
Emoji 11.0 provides the data needed for vendors to begin integrating the code into their platforms ahead of the launch of Unicode 11.0 scheduled for June 2018, and the new emojis should start appearing on users’ phones some time in August or September. New emojis include man and woman with new hairstyles (red-haired, curly-haired, white-haired and bald), superhero and supervillain, leg, foot, hot and cold face emojis, and many more. This brings the total number of emojis to 2,823. For a complete list and sample images of all the new emojis, please visit Emojipedia.
For more information about Lexalytics and emoji analysis, please visit the Lexalytics blog.