Semantics and Sentiment: Cross-lingual Variations in Emoji Use

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.