Differences in emoji sentiment perception between readers and writers

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 an 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. The disagreement concentrates in negative emoji, where the authors report to feel 26% worse than perceived by readers. Emoji use was not found to be correlated with author moodiness. Authors that use emoji are happier than authors that never use emoji.