Visual Blending for Concept Representation: A Case Study on Emoji Generation

João Miguel Cunha, Nuno Lourenço, Pedro Martins, Penousal Machado

Abstract: The emoji connection between visual representation and semantic knowledge, together with its large conceptual coverage have the potential to be exploited in computational approaches to the visual representation of concepts. An example of a system that explores this potential is Emojinating—a system that uses a process of visual blending of existing emoji to represent concepts. In this paper, we use the Emojinating system as a case study to analyse the appropriateness of visual blending for the visual representation of concepts. We conduct three experiments in which we analyse output quality, type of blend used, usefulness to the user and ease of interpretation. Our main contributions are the following: (i) the production of a double-word concept list for testing the system; (ii) an extensive user study using two different concept lists (single-word and double-word); and (iii) a study that compares produced blends with user drawings.