Graphicon Evolution on the Chinese Social Media Platform BiliBili

Yiqiong Zhang, Susan Herring, Suifu Gan


Abstract
This study examines the evolutionary trajectory of graphicons in a 13-year corpus of comments from BiliBili, a popular Chinese video-sharing platform. Findings show that emoticons (kaomoji) rose and fell in frequency, while emojis and stickers are both presently on the rise. Graphicon distributions differ in comments and replies to comments. There is also a strong correlation between the types of graphicons used in comments and their corresponding replies, suggesting a priming effect. Finally, qualitative analysis of the 10 most-frequent kaomojis, emojis, and stickers reveals a trend for each successive graphicon type to become less about emotion expression and more integrated with platform-specific culture and the Chinese language. These findings lend partial support to claims in the literature about graphicon evolution.
Anthology ID:
2022.emoji-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media
Month:
July
Year:
2022
Address:
Seattle, Washington, USA
Editors:
Sanjaya Wijeratne, Jennifer Lee, Horacio Saggion, Amit Sheth
Venue:
Emoji
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
75–85
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emoji-1.9
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emoji-1.9
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yiqiong Zhang, Susan Herring, and Suifu Gan. 2022. Graphicon Evolution on the Chinese Social Media Platform BiliBili. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media, pages 75–85, Seattle, Washington, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Graphicon Evolution on the Chinese Social Media Platform BiliBili (Zhang et al., Emoji 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emoji-1.9.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.emoji-1.9.mp4