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Clearly, a 🙂 is happier than a 🙁 but what about a :-* and a 😀 ? Or a 😐 and a 😮 ? In this post I attempt to rank emoticons in order of how happy someone has to be to use each one. (And punctuate horribly to avoid mixing punctuation with the emoticon)

To start off, I need a collection of emoticons associated with some text. And where else would I find this, but that gigantic compendium of everyday emotions, the definitive corpus of our age – Twitter.
The methodology is this: I collect lots of tweets containing emoticons, assign each one a ‘sentiment’ score[1], and then order the emoticons based on the average sentiment score of tweets containing each emoticon

The tweet gathering process is fairly direct. I parse tweets obtained from the streaming API[2] which contain any of a set of predefined emoticons and write them out to a file. If you want to, have a look at the Python code here. For the purpose of the R analysis, the tweet texts are already in a file. Each line is then (a) parsed for the emoticons it contains, and (b) assigned a sentiment score[3].

Finally, we plot each tweet on an emoticon-score plot. Like so:

1.  o.O and :* score higher than 🙂
   I think the ubiquity of 🙂 is its burden. People feel 🙂 for all sorts of reasons. Also, the score for o.O is computed over a much smaller number of tweets, and is possibly unstable.
2. I can understand people using 🙂 at sad stuff, but what kind of a person uses 🙁 for happy tweets? (There aren’t many of these, but a couple of them are too far right.) Let’s look at one of  those tweets:
   
   Wow I was sleeping sooooo good which doesn’t happen very often & They called from work & woke me up .. Now I can’t go back to sleep 🙁  
   That makes sense. It’s a tweet that turned sour half way through, but overall, had a pretty high density of positive words, so it’s no surprise that our scorer tagged it with a positive score
3. Here’s a tweet with a 8D in it:

   Got to take a pic with heage ! Who has by far been the most fun, funny and candid lecturer(in my… http://t.co/WaOTW8D2YO

   Notice anything funny? It’s a happy tweet, but the emoticon we were looking for, is conspicuously absent! Actually, the 8D does occur in the tweet – albeit in a url http://t.co/WaOTW8D2YO
   Thanks to Twitter’s automatic url compression using t.co, it’s entirely possible to see an arbitrary collection of alphanumeric characters in a tweet without any semantic information. So be wary of the scores for stuff like 8D and xD.

Notes
[1] A linear scale where positive is happy, negative is unhappy
[2] Twitter’s Search API handles punctuation poorly, so that’s not an option
[3] Assignment of this score is done via a relatively simple lookup mechanism. This file provides a good evaluation

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