Automatic emotion analysis is a highly challenging task for Natural Language Processing, which has so far mainly relied on textual contents to determine the emotion of text. However, words are not the only media that carry emotional information. In social media, people also use emojis to convey their feelings. Recently, researchers have studied emotional aspects of emojis, and use emoji information to improve the emotion detection and classification, but many issues remain to be addressed. In this study, we examine the impact of emoji embedding on emotion classification and intensity prediction on four individual emotion categories, including anger, fear, joy, and sadness, in order to investigate how emojis affect the automatic analysis of individual emotion categories and intensity. We conducted a comparative study by testing five machine learning models with and without emoji embeddings involved. Our experiment demonstrates that emojis have varying impact on different emotion categories, and there is potential that emojis can be used to enhance emotion information processing.

Over the past decades, Natural Language Processing (NLP) research has been expanding to cover more languages. Recently particularly, NLP community has paid increasing attention to under-resourced languages. However, there are still many languages for which NLP research is limited in terms of both language resources and software tools. Thai language is one of the under-resourced languages in the NLP domain, although it is spoken by nearly 70 million people globally. In this paper, we report on our survey on the past development of Thai NLP research to help understand its current state and future research directions. Our survey shows that, although Thai NLP community has achieved a significant achievement over the past three decades, particularly on NLP upstream tasks such as tokenisation, research on downstream tasks such as syntactic parsing and semantic analysis is still limited. But we foresee that Thai NLP research will advance rapidly as richer Thai language resources and more robust NLP techniques become available.