How cosmopolitan are emojis? Exploring emojis usage and meaning over different languages with distributional semantics

Comunicació presentada a: ACM Conference on Multimedia Conference (MM 2016), celebrada del 15 al 19 d'octubre de 2016 a Amsterdam, Holanda.Choosing the right emoji to visually complement or con- dense the meaning of a message has become part of our daily life. Emojis are pictures, which are naturally combined with plain text, thus creating a new form of language. These pic- tures are the same independently of where we live, but they can be interpreted and used in diferent ways. In this pa- per we compare the meaning and the usage of emojis across diferent languages. Our results suggest that the overall se- mantics of the subset of the emojis we studied is preserved across all the languages we analysed. However, some emojis are interpreted in a diferent way from language to language, and this could be related to socio-geographical diferences.We thank the three anonymous reviewers for their useful comments, especially for the future work. We received par- tial support from the TUNER project (TIN2015-65308-C5-5-R,MINECO/FEDER, UE) and theMaria deMaeztu Units of Excellence Programme (MDM-2015-0502). First author also acknowledges the COST Action IC1307 iV&L Net (European Network on Integrating Vision and Language), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology)