Emojilingo: Harnessing AI to Translate Words into Emojis

Abstract

This paper presents an AI experiment of translation into emoji conducted on a glossary from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. The experiment is part of a project aiming to build up an automated emoji-based pivot language providing an interlingua as a tool for linguistic simplification, accessibility, and international communication: Emojilingo (emojilingo.org). The present test involves human (Emojitaliano) and machine (Chat-GPT) translations in a comparative analysis in order to devise an automated integrated model highlighting emojis’ expressive ability in transferring senses, clarifying semantic obscurities and ambiguities, and simplifying language. A first evaluation highlights Chat-GPT’s ability to deal with a classic archaic literary vocabulary, also raising issues on managing criteria for better grasping the meanings and forms and about the multicultural extent of content transfer.

Publication
Proceedings of the Tenth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2024)