Semantics and Sentiment: Cross-lingual Variations in Emoji Use

Anonymous

TL;DR: Languages differ in emoji use.

Abstract: Over the past decade, the use of emojis in social media has seen a rapid increase. Despite their popularity and image-grounded nature, previous studies have found that people interpret emojis inconsistently when presented in context and in isolation. In this work, we explore whether emoji semantics differ across languages and how semantics interacts with sentiment in emoji use across languages. To do so, we develop a corpus in English, Portuguese and Chinese containing definitions native speakers of these languages give to a set of emojis. We then use these definitions to assess whether speakers of different languages agree on whether an emoji is being used literally or figuratively, as well as whether this literal and figurative use correlates with the sentiment of the context wherein the emoji is grounded. We found that there were varying levels of disagreement on the definition for each emoji but that these stayed fairly consistent across languages. We also demonstrated a correlation between the sentiment of a tweet and the figurative use of an emoji, providing theoretical underpinnings for empirical results in NLP tasks, particularly offering insights that can benefit sentiment analysis models.

Paper Type: long

Research Area: Linguistic theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics

Contribution Types: Theory

Languages Studied: English, Chinese, Portuguese