Semantics and Sentiment: Cross-lingual Variations in Emoji Use (2024)

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 developed a corpus containing the literal meanings for a set of emojis, as defined by L1 speakers in English, Portuguese and Chinese. We then use these definitions to assess whether speakers of different languages agree on whether an emoji is being used literally or figuratively in the context where they are grounded in, as well as whether this literal and figurative use correlates with the sentiment of the context itself. 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.

## introduction much of contemporary communication happens through text-based messaging on online mediums, known as computer-mediated communication (cmc). given that many natural features of language (e.g., prosody, gestures, visual context) can not be encoded in a single modality, speakers have come up with other strategies to communicate their intentions. one such strategy is to use emojis, digital icons that can be used separately or combined with text to provide extra information regarding the desired meaning of an utterance. it * equal contribution. this increase in popularity has also given rise to a growing interest in research from various domains and disciplines on emojis, their semantics, and their use in the language. to illustrate, those who work on language models have been interested in how emojis might aid such systems, e.g., in tasks such as sense disambiguation @xcite . on the other hand, psychologists and linguists have also been interested in investigating how people have integrated emojis into their language use (e.g., @xcite ; @xcite ) and the communicative functions for which they are important (e.g., dresner and @xcite ; @xcite ). however, such studies are not generalisable to cultures and languages beyond english. this sole focus on english can lead to many potential harms, including technologies which are unable to be effective for a large proportion of society. a first attempt to bridge this gap was made by @xcite who examined variation in emoji use across three european languages (two varieties of english, italian and spanish). however, their approach solely relied on the analysis of emoji vector representations, which failed to capture the complete semantic nuances of emojis. they did not incorporate the examination of human judgments in their methodology. instead, the emoji vectors were generated based on contextual information from tweets, and subsequently, similarities were computed to assess the distinctions in emoji usage across languages. apart from a few other studies, such as @xcite and @xcite , the cross-lingual aspect of emoji use has been relatively under-explored. this coupled with the increase in emoji uses underlines the importance of further re-search into emoji variation and semantics, which has real-world implications in detecting online social trends, and cmc in general. therefore, this study aims to explore the sentiment and semantics of emoji use across languages. specifically, we will focus on the literal and figurative use of emojis in tweets, as well as their correlation with the sentiment of the utterances in which they appear. to do so, we pose the following research questions (rqs): rq1: do people disagree on an emoji's contextfree interpretation within and across languages? rq2: does agreement on the literal and figurative use of an emoji differ across different languages? rq3: does the figurative use of emojis correlate with the sentiment of the context in which the emoji is used? to address these questions, we carried out two online experiments in english 1 , european portuguese, and mandarin chinese. the first experiment aimed to collect participants' interpretation of isolated emojis (similar to the work of @xcite ) and establish the literal meaning of the emojis analysed in the second experiment. the objective of the second experiment was to gather participants' interpretations of emojis presented in textual context in regard to their sentiment and agreement with the provided literal meaning. our overall results show that: (i) across languages, emoji meanings are fairly consistent, and (ii) there is a correlation between emoji use (literal/figurative) and sentiment (positive/negative). the data collected for our experiments will be publicly released as additional resources for the sentiment analysis and emojis' figurative use detection tasks. in the following sections, we first detail the theoretical background with which we motivate our rqs and methods, we then describe the methods used to collect data, followed by our results and a discussion. we conclude by discussing directions for future work, and the limitations of our study. ## conclusion this study aimed to explore the role of semantic variation and sentiment in emoji use across three languages: english, european portuguese, and mandarin chinese. we conducted two separate experiments, encompassing three research questions. the first experiment involved soliciting literal meanings of 10 carefully selected emoji stimuli in all three languages and comparing them based on a semantic variation metric. the second experiment queried participants on their understanding of the use of these emojis in tweets based on the literal meanings procured from experiment 1. participants provided binary judgements with regard to the use (literal/figurative) of the emoji and the sentiment of the tweet (positive/negative). the results obtained from our study demonstrated that emojis exhibit variations in terms of semantic interpretation among themselves, yet their interpretations remain relatively consistent across different languages. notably, our findings in experiment 2 corroborated the outcomes derived from experiment 1. our results indicated that language itself does serve as a significant predictor of emoji usage or the sentiment conveyed. however, the locus of this effect seems to be driven by linguistic distance. overall, we believe these results, while limited, pave the way for promising research directions which we discuss in the following section.