LINGUISTIC AND ICON BASED MESSAGE CONVERSION FOR VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS AND OBJECTS

Systems and methods that convert messages to virtual actions and behaviors of virtual objects are provided herein. An example method includes receiving a message in from a user, the message having linguistic content, performing a lexical analysis of the linguistic content to determine one or more tokens within the linguistic content, where a token includes words or phrases of the linguistic content that are indicative of an emotion, and selecting one or more expressions for an avatar of the user based on the one or more tokens present in the linguistic content.