THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN EMOJI & LINGUISTIC TEXT Helena Lau Yan - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN EMOJI & LINGUISTIC TEXT

Helena Lau Yan Ping, Sophia Lee Yat Mei helena.lau@connect.polyu.hk ym.lee@polyu.edu.hk

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Outline

• Introduction
• Objectives
• Related Work
• Corpus Data & Data Analysis
• The Interplay between Emoji and Linguistic Text
• Conclusion

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Introduction

• Emoticons are ubiquitous in computer mediated communication (CMC)
• Traditional emoticons have been gradually replaced by emojis
• Emoticons = ;-) ; Emojis =
• Generally believed to be an effective emotion indicator
• E.g. I’m so happy about that = happiness
• Studies indicated that emojis can serve as an amplifier or modifier when an emoji and

its linguistic text are in disagreement

• This poses a real challenge to the automatic emotion detection

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Objectives

• Which channel determines the overall emotion when the emoji and its accompanying

text disagree with each other?

• If the overall emotion is determined by text, what is the function of the emoji?

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Related Work

• Previous work proposed that emotions can be expressed by means of emoticons (Rezabek

& Cochenour 1998, Wolf 2000, Crystal 2006, Dresner & Herring 2010)

• Although emoticons have different communicative purposes, such as maintaining a

conversational connection, expressing humor, strengthening a message and showing a close tie with the others (Derks et al. 2008, Kelly & Watts 2015), they are primarily used to convey affect (Rezabek & Cochenour 1998, Wolf 2000, Crystal 2006, Dresner & Herring 2010).

• When an emoticon and the accompanying text disagree with each other
• Derks et al. (2008) : the sentiment become closer to neutral, but not enough to switch from
• ne polarity to another
• Skovholt et al. (2014): emoticons can soften negativity or strengthen positivity
• Riordan (2017): emojis only alter the intensity of that emotion

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Corpus Data

• Made up of 200 trending events and each of them includes 150 comments, taken from Weibo
• Adds up to 30,000 comments for the entire corpus, of which 10,000 were manually annotated with

emotion information

• 5 basic emotions are tagged, namely Happiness, Sadness, Anger, Fear, Surprise
• 802 comments containing emojis associated with a particular emotion were extracted (in Appendix)
• Annotators read through the comments and decided whether the emojis are used in a typical way

(1) 生活真的很难，想起我的爸爸 ‘Life is really hard, (I’m) thinking of my father ’

(2) 快开学了要写完了被撕了也是很绝望

‘School is about to start. It is hopeless to see the homework being torn when it is almost done ’

’

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Data Analysis

Typical (%) Atypical (%) Total Happiness 319 (66.6%) 160 (33.4%) 479 Sadness 61 (92.4%) 5 (7.6%) 66 Anger 243 (94.6%) 14 (5.4%) 257 Fear 0 (0%) 0 (0%) Surprise 0 (0%) 0 (0%) Total 623 (77.7%) 179 (22.3%) 802 Table 1. Typical and Atypical Use of Emojis

• Of the 802 comments, 77.7% of emojis

are used typically, and 22.3% atypically

• As there are no emojis associated with

fear and surprise, no statistics can be shown for the two emotions

• Among the other three emotions,

emojis of happiness (33.4%) are most likely used in an atypical way, followed by sadness (7.6%) and anger (5.4%). It shows that emojis expressing happiness often disagree with their linguistic text.

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The Interplay between Happiness Emoji & Text

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• Text expressing sadness or fear :

fifty-fifty chance that the overall emotion is determined by either channel

• Text expressing anger or surprise :

likely determined by text

The Interplay between Happiness Emoji & Text

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• Happiness Emoji + Text expressing Anger
• Happiness Emoji + Text expressing Surprise
• Happiness Emoji + Text expressing Surprise

The Interplay between Happiness Emoji & Text

Anger Surprise Happiness

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• The complex emotion, 感動 moved [happiness (primary) + sadness (secondary)]

The Interplay between Sadness Emoji & Text

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The Interplay between Anger Emoji & Text

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The Interplay between Anger Emoji & Text

• Anger Emoji + Text expressing Happiness

Happiness

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Conclusion

• This paper examines the interplay between emoji and its accompanying linguistic text when the two

channels are at odds.

• Results show that happiness emojis are most often used in an atypical way, as compared to the other

emotions.

• Furthermore, happiness emojis are often used ironically to express anger. When two channels conflict

with each other, the overall emotion is generally determined by text regardless of the emotion type.

• When the overall emotion is determined by text, an emoji can function as an iconic means to strengthen

the emotion expressed by text. It can also function as a modifier to enrich the complexity of the emotion.

• We believe that this linguistic account of the atypical use of emojis will enhance the existing automatic

emotion classification models.

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Thank you!

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