<div>Textual emotion classification is a task in affective AI that branches from sentiment analysis and focuses on identifying emotions expressed in a given text excerpt. </div><div>It has a wide variety of applications that improve human-computer interactions, particularly to empower computers to understand subjective human language better. </div><div>Significant research has been done on this task, but very little of that research leverages one of the most emotion-bearing symbols we have used in modern communication: Emojis.</div><div>In this thesis, we propose several transformer-based models for emotion classification that processes emojis as input tokens and leverages pretrained models and uses them</div><div>, a model that processes Emojis as textual inputs and leverages DeepMoji to generate affective feature vectors used as reference when aggregating different modalities of text encoding. </div><div>To evaluate ReferEmo, we experimented on the SemEval 2018 and GoEmotions datasets, two benchmark datasets for emotion classification, and achieved competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art models tested on these datasets. Notably, our model performs better on the underrepresented classes of each dataset.</div>