Emoticon Style: Interpreting Differences in Emoticons Across Cultures
By Jaram Park, Vladimir Barash, Clayton Fink, Meeyoung Cha. 2013
174 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Emoticons are a key aspect of text-based communication, and are the equivalent of nonverbal cues to the medium of online chat, forums, and social media like Twitter. As emoticons become more widespread in computer mediated communication, a vocabulary of different symbols with subtle emotional distinctions emerges especially across different cultures. In this paper, we investigate the semantic, cultural, and social aspects of emoticon usage on Twitter and show that emoticons are not limited to conveying a specific emotion or used as jokes, but rather are socio-cultural norms, whose meaning can vary depending on the identity of the speaker. We also demonstrate how these norms propagate through the Twitter @-reply network. We confirm our results on a large-scale dataset of over one billion Tweets from different time periods and countries.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Human-Computer Interaction
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Artificial Intelligence
- Sebastian Riedel
- Tim Rocktaschel
- Isabelle Augenstein
- Jacob Eisenstein
- Matko Bosnjak
- Mohit Bansal
- Shuo Chang
- Daqing Zhang
In Human-Computer Interaction
- Jacob Eisenstein
- Isabelle Augenstein
- Qi Dan
- Umashanthi Pavalanathan
- Zhe Mu
- Maokun Yang
- Jahna Otterbacher
- Qiyu Bai
Citations in the corpus
- "Blissfully Happy" or "Ready toFight": Varying Interpretations of Emoji (2016, background): “2012), blogs (Huffaker and Calvert 2006), and, more recently, Twitter (Park et al. 2013).”
- A Systematic Review of Emoji: Current Research and Future Perspectives (2019, background): “Emoji use is structured by a combination of linguistic and social contexts, as well as cultural conventions (Derks et al., 2008a; Park et al., 2013), and is influenced by many factors, such as cultural background, living environment, language environment and user group.”
- emoji2vec: Learning Emoji Representations from their Description (2016, background): “Some of the limitations of our work are evident in the work of Park et al. (2013) who showed that different cultural phenomena and languages may co-opt conventional emoji sentiment.”
- Emoticons vs. Emojis on Twitter: A Causal Inference Approach (2015, background): “…later research has shown that emoticons are not just representation of affective stances; they play many other roles in written communication such as showing author intention, sociocultural differences, and author identity (Derks, Bos, and Von Grumbkow 2007; Schnoebelen 2012; Park et al. 2013).”
- Write Like I Write: Herding in the Language of Online Reviews (2014, background): “Emoticons on Twitter: Is the use of emoticons a social norm, transmitted from user to user? (Park et al. 2013) A user’s network of contacts with whom she has exchanged replies at least twice.”
- Participatory Cultural Mapping Based on Collective Behavior Data in Location-Based Social Networks (2016, background): “[Park et al. 2013] investigated the cultural differences on the usage of facial expressions for emotion in Twitter.”