TY - CONF
T1 - Semantic Journeys: Quantifying Change in Emoji Meaning from 2012-2018
AU - Robertson, Alexander
AU - Liza, Farhana Ferdousi
AU - Nguyen, Dong
AU - McGillivray, Barbara
AU - Hale, Scott A
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - The semantics of emoji has, to date, been considered from a static perspective. We offer the first longitudinal study of how emoji semantics changes over time, applying techniques from computational linguistics to six years of Twitter data. We identify five patterns in emoji semantic development and find evidence that the less abstract an emoji is, the more likely it is to undergo semantic change. In addition, we analyse select emoji in more detail, examining the effect of seasonality and world events on emoji semantics. To aid future work on emoji and semantics, we make our data publicly available along with a web-based interface that anyone can use to explore semantic change in emoji.
AB - The semantics of emoji has, to date, been considered from a static perspective. We offer the first longitudinal study of how emoji semantics changes over time, applying techniques from computational linguistics to six years of Twitter data. We identify five patterns in emoji semantic development and find evidence that the less abstract an emoji is, the more likely it is to undergo semantic change. In addition, we analyse select emoji in more detail, examining the effect of seasonality and world events on emoji semantics. To aid future work on emoji and semantics, we make our data publicly available along with a web-based interface that anyone can use to explore semantic change in emoji.
U2 - 10.48550/arXiv.2105.00846
DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2105.00846
M3 - Paper
ER -