The technology relates to methods for detecting and classifying emotions in textual communication, and using this information to suggest graphical indicia such as emoji, stickers or GIFs to a user. Two main types of models are fully supervised models and few-shot models. In addition to fully supervised and few-shot models, other types of models focusing on the back-end (server) side or client (on-device) side may also be employed. Server-side models are larger-scale models that can enable higher degrees of accuracy, such as for use cases where models can be hosted on cloud servers where computational and storage resources are relatively abundant. On-device models are smaller-scale models, which enable use on resource-constrained devices such as mobile phones, smart watches or other wearables (e.g., head mounted displays), in-home devices, embedded devices, etc.