:telephone::person::sailboat::whale::okhand:; or "Call me Ishmael" - How   do you translate emoji?
  We report on an exploratory analysis of Emoji Dick, a project that leverages crowdsourcing to translate Melville's Moby Dick into emoji. This distinctive use of emoji removes textual context, and leads to a varying translation quality. In this paper, we use statistical word alignment and part-of-speech tagging to explore how people use emoji. Despite these simple methods, we observed differences in token and part-of-speech distributions. Experiments also suggest that semantics are preserved in the translation, and repetition is more common in emoji. 
Will Radford and Andrew Chisholm and Ben Hachey and Bo Han
cs.CL