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 CLSW2020 ym.lee@polyu.edu.hk 1

Outline ◦ Introduction ◦ Objectives ◦ Related Work ◦ Corpus Data & Data Analysis ◦ The Interplay between Emoji and Linguistic Text ◦ Conclusion CLSW2020 2

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 CLSW2020 3

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? CLSW2020 4

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 one polarity to another ◦ Skovholt et al. (2014): emoticons can soften negativity or strengthen positivity ◦ Riordan (2017): emojis only alter the intensity of that emotion CLSW2020 5

’ 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 ’ CLSW2020 6

Data Analysis ◦ Of the 802 comments, 77.7% of emojis are used typically, and 22.3% Typical (%) Atypical (%) Total atypically Happiness 319 (66.6%) 160 (33.4%) 479 ◦ As there are no emojis associated with fear and surprise, no statistics can be Sadness 61 (92.4%) 5 (7.6%) 66 shown for the two emotions Anger 243 (94.6%) 14 (5.4%) 257 ◦ Among the other three emotions, emojis of happiness (33.4%) are most Fear 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 0 likely used in an atypical way, followed by sadness (7.6%) and anger Surprise 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 0 (5.4%). It shows that emojis expressing happiness often disagree with their Total 623 (77.7%) 179 (22.3%) 802 linguistic text. Table 1. Typical and Atypical Use of Emojis CLSW2020 7

The Interplay between Happiness Emoji & Text CLSW2020 8

The Interplay between Happiness Emoji & Text ◦ 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 CLSW2020 9

The Interplay between Happiness Emoji & Text ◦ Happiness Emoji + Text expressing Anger Anger ◦ Happiness Emoji + Text expressing Surprise Surprise ◦ Happiness Emoji + Text expressing Surprise Happiness CLSW2020 10

The Interplay between Sadness Emoji & Text ◦ The complex emotion, 感動 moved [happiness (primary) + sadness (secondary)] CLSW2020 11

The Interplay between Anger Emoji & Text CLSW2020 12

The Interplay between Anger Emoji & Text ◦ Anger Emoji + Text expressing Happiness Happiness CLSW2020 13

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. CLSW2020 14

Thank you! CLSW2020 15