How cosmopolitan are emojis? Exploring emojis usage and meaning over different languages with distributional semantics

Barbieri, Francesco; Kruszewski, German; Ronzano, Francesco; Saggion, Horacio

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2964284.2967278

How cosmopolitan are emojis? Exploring emojis usage and meaning over different languages with distributional semantics

Citació

Barbieri F, Kruszewski G, Ronzano F, Saggion H. How cosmopolitan are emojis? Exploring emojis usage and meaning over different languages with distributional semantics. In: Hanjalic A, Snoek C, Worring M, Bulterman DCA, Huet B, Kelliher A, Kompatsiaris Y, Li J, editors. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Multimedia Conference (MM 2016); 2016 Oct 15-19; Amsterdam, The Netherlands. New York, NY: ACM; 2016. p. 531-5. DOI: 10.1145/2964284.2967

Resum

Choosing the right emoji to visually complement or con- dense the meaning of a message has become part of our daily life. Emojis are pictures, which are naturally combined with plain text, thus creating a new form of language. These pic- tures are the same independently of where we live, but they can be interpreted and used in diferent ways. In this pa- per we compare the meaning and the usage of emojis across diferent languages. Our results suggest that the overall se- mantics of the subset of the emojis we studied is preserved across all the languages we analysed. However, some emojis are interpreted in a diferent way from language to language, and this could be related to socio-geographical diferences.