How Gender and Skin Tone Modifiers Affect Emoji Semantics in Twitter

Francesco Barbieri, Jose Camacho-Collados


Abstract
In this paper we analyze the use of emojis in social media with respect to gender and skin tone. By gathering a dataset of over twenty two million tweets from United States some findings are clearly highlighted after performing a simple frequency-based analysis. Moreover, we carry out a semantic analysis on the usage of emojis and their modifiers (e.g. gender and skin tone) by embedding all words, emojis and modifiers into the same vector space. Our analyses reveal that some stereotypes related to the skin color and gender seem to be reflected on the use of these modifiers. For example, emojis representing hand gestures are more widely utilized with lighter skin tones, and the usage across skin tones differs significantly. At the same time, the vector corresponding to the male modifier tends to be semantically close to emojis related to business or technology, whereas their female counterparts appear closer to emojis about love or makeup.
Anthology ID:
S18-2011
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Malvina Nissim, Jonathan Berant, Alessandro Lenci
Venue:
*SEM
SIGs:
SIGLEX | SIGSEM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
101–106
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/S18-2011
DOI:
10.18653/v1/S18-2011
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Francesco Barbieri and Jose Camacho-Collados. 2018. How Gender and Skin Tone Modifiers Affect Emoji Semantics in Twitter. In Proceedings of the Seventh Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, pages 101–106, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How Gender and Skin Tone Modifiers Affect Emoji Semantics in Twitter (Barbieri & Camacho-Collados, *SEM 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/S18-2011.pdf
Code
 fvancesco/emoji_modifiers