Demoji

Visit our live webapp! demoji.tech

Inspiration:

Inspired by never knowing what the heck our friends were saying, our team set out looking for a solution. The task of not just mapping words out of emojis but creating meaning out of multiple showed promise of a challenging task with larger implications.

What do it do?

Demoji (demoji.tech) is a translator from a string of emojis into coherent, grammatically correct clauses. Hosted on AWS, our webapp allows users to input emojis and view the english output. Our algorithm doesn't just map words to emojis, but use the mappings to create unique meaning over strings of emojis. Here's what it does under the hood:

How it works:

Each emoji has a title given to it by Unicode. This is retrieved and run through Natural Language Tool Kit (NLTK). NLTK gives a wide range of synonyms for the word in the form of verbs, nouns, adj, etc. Before we pass the meanings to our sentence former, we use word embeddings give us meaning instead of just similar words, letting us move away from words and into ideas.
These ideas and their order are analyzed to choose the best sentence (or clause) structure possible. It does not use the words from the emoji itself but the meanings passed to us by the word embeddings.
The structure and words chosen are then passed to our Context Free Grammar (CFG) to transform a list of things and actions into a grammatically correct clause, and the clauses are strung together to form the final output.

What we learned:

Here are the technologies or techniques we learned: NLTK, NLP, Bootstrap, AWS, and more.

What's next for Demoji:

There are a number of outlets that we can use to help people better communicate on the internet. We would love to expand our algorithm to a chrome extension that automatically translates in conversation, or an iOS iMessage app for instant translation.