Emoticon Style: Interpreting Differences in Emoticons Across Cultures

Emoticons are a key aspect of text-based communication, and are the equivalent of nonverbal cues to the medium of online chat, forums, and social media like Twitter. As emoticons become more widespread in computer mediated communication, a vocabulary of different symbols with subtle emotional distinctions emerges especially across different cultures. In this paper, we investigate the semantic, cultural, and social aspects of emoticon usage on Twitter and show that emoticons are not limited to conveying a specific emotion or used as jokes, but rather are socio-cultural norms, whose meaning can vary depending on the identity of the speaker. We also demonstrate how these norms propagate through the Twitter @-reply network. We confirm our results on a large-scale dataset of over one billion Tweets from different time periods and countries. Introduction The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said. –Peter Drucker Body language and facial expressions can sometimes tell more about what one is trying to express than what one actually says in face-to-face interactions. Changes in vocal intonation can serve a similar purpose in exclusively spoken communications. Such cues take up an estimated 93% of everyday communication (Mehrabian 1971) and help people better communicate complex emotions like humor, doubt, and sarcasm. In text-based communication, however, these cues are not present and their absence can result in misunderstanding and confusion. The growth in computer-mediated communications has led to the use of conventions where emotion or affect is referenced pictorially using alphanumerics, punctuations, or other characters. These symbolic representations are commonly referred to as emoticons (Walther and D’addario 2001). The origin of emoticons is of dispute—especially for the basic smiley :)—but most studies suggest that they appeared in the early 1980s and have since gained massive popularity (Derks, Bos, and Grumbkow 2007). Emoticons, like Copyright c © 2013, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. nonverbal cues, help people interpret the nuance of meaning, the attitude of a conversational partner, and the level of emotion not captured by language elements alone (Lo 2008; Gajadhar and Green 2005). With the advent of mobile communications, the use of emoticons has become an everyday practice for people throughout the world. Interestingly, the emoticons used by people vary by geography and culture. Easterners, for example employ a vertical style like ˆ ˆ, while westerners employ a horizontal style like :-). This difference may be due to cultural reasons since easterners are known to interpret facial expressions from the eyes, while westerners favor the mouth (Yuki, Maddux, and Masuda 2007; Mai et al. 2011; Jack et al. 2012). In this paper, we study emoticon usage on Twitter based on complete data of tweets from the period 2006 through 2009, the first three years of this now ubiquitous microblogging platform. We focus on the macro-level trend first, and examine what emoticons are popular and how they vary stylistically. Next, viewing emoticon usage as a social norm, we study how emoticons differ across cultural boundaries defined by geography and language. We then contrast what affect categories are associated with emoticons across countries. Moving from the macro-level to the level of user-to-user interactions, we use the Twitter @-reply graph to investigate the propagation processes of particular emoticons over social links, and study how the diffusion characteristics of emoticons can help us understand which emoticons have broader appeal in a new cultural setting. We make several interesting findings: 1. Emoticons are generally used in positive and light context, and as a result tweets containing extremely angry or anxious sentiment rarely accompanied emoticons. 2. Users continuously expand the meanings of emoticons by adopting variants of the normative forms such as :) with pictorial representations of facial features such as winks ;), forehead =:), and nose :-). These variants are sometimes associated with different kinds of affect than their normative forms. 3. While geography matters in determining the emoticon style, language has a higher impact. In the Philippines and Indonesia, where English is in common usage along with Proceedings of the Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media