Online writing lacks the non-verbal cues present in face-toface communication, which provide additional contextual information about the utterance, such as the speaker's intention or affective state. To fill this void, a number of orthographic features, such as emoticons, expressive lengthening, and non-standard punctuation, have become popular in social media services including Twitter and Instagram. Recently, emojis have been introduced to social media, and are increasingly popular. This raises the question of whether these predefined pictographic characters will come to replace earlier orthographic methods of paralinguistic communication. In this abstract, we attempt to shed light on this question, using a matching approach from causal inference to test whether the adoption of emojis causes individual users to employ fewer emoticons in their text on Twitter.
Pavalanathan and Eisenstein REF used a matching approach from causal inference to test whether the adoption of emojis causes individual users to employ fewer emoticons in their text on Twitter.
Emoticons vs. Emojis on Twitter: A Causal Inference Approach
ArXiv
ArXiv
Computer Science