Emoji (Not Language Specific)

PRACTICAL IDEAS AND RESOURCES

Resources in this section curated by: Arely Zarate-Chavez 

ACADEMIC RESOURCES ON EMOJI

Resources in this section curated by: Arely Zarate-Chavez 

Alshenqeeti. (2016). Are Emojis Creating a New or Old Visual Language for New Generations? A Socio-semiotic Study. Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 7(6), 56–. https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.alls.v.7n.6p.56 

This article explores the impact of emojis on communication, as well as pointing out that the idea of communicating through the use of pictures is not unique or completely new (i.e. hieroglyphics, rebus). It especially relates emoji use to the much needed cues often missing in purely text based conversation that would be present in face-to-face communication. For this reason emojis are also not straightforward, and can often vary in meaning. Some factors that influence this difference include gender, age, cultural background, as well as the unique context of a message.

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Barbieri, Ronzano F., and Saggion H. (2016). What does this Emoji Mean? A Vector Space Skip-Gram Model for Twitter Emojis. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 3967–3972, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).

This paper attempted to label emojis into similar groups by creating a vector model. They also showed the relationship between the text and emoji. The source of their data was Twitter, where they examined several different examples of emojis. The best thing about this article is how they laid out the context of emojis. By distinguishing them into groups that have similar usage we begin to see patterns of emoji usage. This shows the subjectivity of emojis, as in many emojis can mean similar things. It also shows how the combinations of emojis can be defined, by labeling the emojis with the text they are normally accompanied by.

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Barbieri and Camacho-Collados J. (2018). How Gender and Skin Tone Modifiers Affect Emoji Semantics in Twitter. In Proceedings of the Seventh Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, pages 101–106, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics. 

This study attempts to analyze the use of skin tone and gender modifiers on the semantic evaluation of emoji use. Gender modified emojis seemed to correlate to gender stereotypes in that the neighboring emojis for male modified emojis were often related to business and tech, while female modified emojis were often related to love and makeup. It was shown that dark skin emoji modifiers were “more associated with derogatory words and emojis”.

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Brants, Sharif B., and Serebrenik A. (2019). Assessing the Meaning of Emojis for Emotional Awareness - A Pilot Study. In Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference (WWW '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 419–423. https://doi.org/10.1145/3308560.3316550 

This is a pilot study that was attempting to analyze the meaning of emojis in order to help facilitate communication between team members. Their intention is that it is easy to miss the emotions of others and take things out of context. Therefore emojis will help resolve this issue, and even will help transcend the language barrier. The study wanted to help facilitate this by looking at how different ages and gender interpret emojis. The main question was “whether emotion-related emojis are indeed a suitable way of determining the emotional state of a participant”, with an emphasis on if gender and age influence the interpretation of emojis. The study hypothesized that there would be a noticeable difference between gender and age interpretations. The results showed that some emoji faces, such as pouting face, crying face, and face with open mouth, were labeled similarly for both age and gender. Whereas emojis like unamused face were split in the age category. The results show that for some emojis they are not universally explicit enough to use, and at the same time there are a few emojis that are salient in what they are trying to infer that age and gender do not affect how they are interpreted.

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Chaudhary, Anugrah Hayati S., Otani N., and Black A. W. (2019). What A Sunny Day ☔: Toward Emoji-Sensitive Irony Detection. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2019), pages 212–216, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.

This study aims to analyze the ironic use of emojis through sentiment analysis and opinion mining. There was use of manual data analysis, and they found that positive emojis are likely to be paired with negative tests and vice versa to express irony. This seems to be the most straightforward method of irony detection as many other forms may be too ambiguous or contextual.

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Coyle, & Carmichael, C. L. (2019). Perceived responsiveness in text messaging: The role of emoji use. Computers in Human Behavior, 99, 181–189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.05.023 

This study attempts to see the perception of individuals in computer mediated communication while using emojis. Participants were to assign a positive or negative alignment with the responder of messages over iMessage. They were randomly assigned a responder between the two choices, one that sent solely text messages or one that sent a mixture of both emojis and texts. The article discusses how nonverbal cues are necessary to communicate emotion and intention in Face to Face interactions. But these nonverbal cues are unavailable in CMC, and therefore emojis have been created, but even without emojis there are increases in intimacy and improvements in relationships through CmC due to the intimate nature we have attributed with messaging. This gives emojis even more meaning considering how messaging has proven to already be meaningful. The study showed the responsiveness and perception participants had towards the responder. Their results proved to be heavily reliant on how much the participant used emojis, showing an increase in positive attitude toward the responder and responsiveness when the participant used emojis. In contrast, when the participant didn’t use emojis it was found the responders' usage of emojis didn't help with obtaining a positive perception from the participant.

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Dresner, & Herring, S. C. (2010). Functions of the Nonverbal in CMC: Emoticons and Illocutionary Force. Communication Theory, 20(3), 249–268. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2010.01362.x 

Dresner and Herring argue in this article that emoticons are misrepresented, whereas they are claimed to be portraying emotion, they argue emoticons are establishing pragmatic meaning. The basis of this is that emoticons, through their naming, have been misconstrued and are not accounting for some of their uses. Dresner and Herring make the claim that emoticons indicate the illocutionary force behind the text. They further separate the usage of the emoticons into three uses; emotion indicators, which are mapped directly onto a facial expression, non-emotional indicators, which can be mapped conventionally onto the face, and as illocutionary force indicators which prove to be difficult to map onto the face. Overall, the article seeks to define their theoretical account of emoticons as being more than extra-linguistic behavior and serve linguistic uses, and the researchers used this to argue that this could be said further for facial gestures, which have been discussed as linguistic tools instead of extra-linguistic. 

“(a) emotion, mapped directly onto facial expression (e.g., happy or sad); (b) nonemotional meaning, mapped conventionally onto facial expression(e.g., a wink as indicating joking intent; an anxious smile); and (c) illocutionary force indicators that do not map conventionally onto facial expression (e.g., a smile as downgrading a complaint to a simple assertion).” (pg.15) 

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Gn. (2018). Emoji as a “language” of cuteness. First Monday, 23(9). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v23i9.9396 

The author of this article attempted to verify that emojis are cute, which seemed to be a little confusing. But, the discussion of the article clarifies that by confirming this, it confirms that emojis are actually a way to humanize the technology we use. By having these personable faces and other icons they allow us to add a human-like characteristic to our messaging apps. This creates a user-friendly platform that is visually pleasing. The article also implies that by having these friendly icons, they not only make the experience of messaging more pleasurable for the sender and receiver, but also promote the usage of them due to the pleasant nature of them. The argument we got from it was that emojis help to stimulate and promote the messaging platforms that they are on.

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Goldman. (2018). Emojis And The Law. Washington Law Review, 93(3), 1227–1291. 

Goldman in this article examines the subjective nature of emojis and how this nature plays into the law. The possible miscommunication that emojis afford is an issue that has presented itself to the judicial system several times, due to the fact that “emojis pose garden-variety interpretative challenges to courts”. Examples of this include smiley faces present in emails between employers who fired an employee, depicting their happiness with firing the individual, or even between the attorney of the defendant and the team prosecuting the defendant. There are several issues with defining the emoji for courts, everything from the size and difficulty of distinguishing which emoji it actually is to the multiple meanings of emojis. The usage of emojis within computer mediated speech(CMC) is something that has increasingly become a problem for courts due to the increase of usage. The fact that there is no dictionary for emojis, and that a dictionary may even be misleading, proves to make the issue even worse as more emojis are released. The way the law has decided to handle emojis is by not only examining the context of the conversation heavily, but also analyzing what the emoji meant on that platform as well as the time period, due to the many inconsistencies of meaning between both those factors. Overall, whereas many believe that emojis are helping us communicate, in reality the emojis we send can be misconstrued and therefore lead to wrong prosecutions.

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Hakami, S. (2017). The Importance of Understanding Emoji : An Investigative Study.

This paper discussed the emergence of emojis as a new language that adds a humanizing aspect to plain text. There are many theories in Psychology, Sociology and Linguistics that show why humans would be inclined to use emojis, from non-verbal cues and empathy, intention and sociocultural differences, to illocutionary force and lack of facial expressions. The basic text conversations can be disambiguated with the use of emojis to set the tone and intention of the interlocutors. The purpose of this paper was to bring attention to the influence of emojis in the current digital space.

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Kabir, H., Marlow, D.W. (2019). Emojis in Textual-Based Communication Among College Students: A Study in Perception and Frequency. In: Meiselwitz, G. (eds) Social Computing and Social Media. Design, Human Behavior and Analytics. HCII 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11578. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21902-4_24 

These researchers examined the frequency and perception of emojis among college aged students. They reference previous research for the main basis of their analysis, stating the difficulties with deciphering the sentiment lexicon with choosing which emojis use. The lens of their study is through Twitter usage in the United States and they point that the usage of emojis isn’t actually that widespread among users, but those who do use them frequently. Furthermore, the U.S. is not the largest user of emojis, in general, with Indonesia leading that forefront. They began their research with a cluster survey consisting of seventeen questions, based around frequency, usage, and perception of emojis. After the survey an open ended interview was conducted on two couples. This allowed the researchers to examine the difference of meaning and usage between gender and relationship status. The researchers findings showed that 85% of respondents gave an 8 or higher on a scale of 1-10 that emojis are a universal language. They also found that it is beneficial in communication through computer mediated speech to use emojis, pointing out that college students have a higher confidence that their message is coming off as intended. They also help to reduce the guessing game when emojis are absent from a text. It should be said that the younger participants (16-19 and 20-23 years old) of the survey found that emojis alter intended perception, more than their older (24-27 years old) counterparts.

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Li, & Yang, Y. (2018). Pragmatic functions of emoji in internet-based communication---a corpus-based study. Asian. J. Second. Foreign. Lang. Educ. 3, 16. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40862-018-0057-z 

This study aimed to identify the frequency and function of emoji use in WeChat. The study points out that emojis and emoticons are mostly used in the same way. The success of interpersonal communication is reliant on suprasegmental features, and the absence of this in non-verbal behavior negatively affects online communication. The study found that the use of emojis correlated most as “emotion signifier[s] and [as an] interaction device”. It also suggests that “high frequency of Emoji use may result from its high functionality and efficiency”.  

Emoji was also found to have pragmatic functions, to be specific, markers of illocutionary force (Dresner & Herring, 2010), politeness strategy (Darics, 2010; Kavanagh, 2016), face-saving strategies (Maíz-Arévalo, 2015) and boosters of group rapport (Golato and Taleghani-Nikazm, 2006; Walther and D’Addario, 2001) and of rapport among interlocutors (Maíz-Arévalo, 2015) as well.

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Moschini. (2017). The “Face with Tears of Joy” Emoji. A Socio-Semiotic and Multimodal Insight into a Japan-America Mash-Up. Hermes (Århus, Denmark), 55, 11–25. https://doi.org/10.7146/hjlcb.v0i55.24286 

The ‘tears of joy’ emoji was announced as the 2015 word of the year due to how it reflected the year’s “ethos, mood, and preoccupation” (Moschini, pg 12). This article examines how this came to be, including the cultural transition from Japan into the United States, such as an examination of the language change that involved bringing the emoji into American culture. They also examine the emoji’s emergence on the global digital community from being a niche discourse item of geek culture. This exemplifies how emojis, in a way, transcend language easily. The translation from Japanese was easy and this is because the emoji carries meaning that each language can define using their language. This leads to the conclusion that emojis are vehicles for not just emotions.

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Na’aman, Provenza H., and Montoya O. (2017). Varying Linguistic Purposes of Emoji in (Twitter) Context. In Proceedings of ACL 2017, Student Research Workshop, pages 136–141, Vancouver, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.

This study talks about how emojis can be used both to replace content words, as well as multimodal functions (from attitude, a particular gesture, to topic). It set out to see if emoji use correlated to the same content words in all instances recorded, and if emoji use correlated to the same multi-modal function in all instances recorded. They found that there was a high amount of agreement in the meaning of content word emojis, but in multi-modal use, emojis varied in meaning. 

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López and Cap F. (2017). Did you ever read about Frogs drinking Coffee? Investigating the Compositionality of Multi-Emoji Expressions. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pages 113–117, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.

This article attempts to find the difference between individual emoji use vs multi emoji use by analyzing the function of the frog and hot beverage emojis. They are used together to represent “a sarcastic expression used as a postscript to an insult or disrespectful remark said towards a specific individual or group”. They relate this usage to word clusters in that the individual words have separate meaning to the phrase they appear in. They use sentiment analysis, both manual and automated, to see if the emojis appear in positive, negative or neutral contexts. It was found that the individual use of the frog face emoji and hot beverage emoji were distinct from their combination. There was a more literal use of the frog and beverage emojis alone, and was found to be used in more positive and neutral instances. The frog and hot beverage emojis together were more often negative.