  NLP tasks are often limited by scarcity of manually annotated data. In social
media sentiment analysis and related tasks, researchers have therefore used
binarized emoticons and specific hashtags as forms of distant supervision. Our
paper shows that by extending the distant supervision to a more diverse set of
noisy labels, the models can learn richer representations. Through emoji
prediction on a dataset of 1246 million tweets containing one of 64 common
emojis we obtain state-of-the-art performance on 8 benchmark datasets within
sentiment, emotion and sarcasm detection using a single pretrained model. Our
analyses confirm that the diversity of our emotional labels yield a performance
improvement over previous distant supervision approaches.
