Federated Learning for Emoji Prediction in a Mobile Keyboard

11 Jun 2019 · Swaroop Ramaswamy, Rajiv Mathews, Kanishka Rao, Françoise Beaufays ·

We show that a word-level recurrent neural network can predict emoji from text typed on a mobile keyboard. We demonstrate the usefulness of transfer learning for predicting emoji by pretraining the model using a language modeling task. We also propose mechanisms to trigger emoji and tune the diversity of candidates. The model is trained using a distributed on-device learning framework called federated learning. The federated model is shown to achieve better performance than a server-trained model. This work demonstrates the feasibility of using federated learning to train production-quality models for natural language understanding tasks while keeping users' data on their devices.

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