Fang-Yu Chang
2022
A Quantitative Analysis of Comparison of Emoji Sentiment: Taiwan Mandarin Users and English Users
Fang-Yu Chang
Proceedings of the 34th Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing (ROCLING 2022)
Emojis have become essential components in our digital communication. Emojis, especially smiley face emojis and heart emojis, are considered the ones conveying more emotions. In this paper, two functions of emoji usages are discussed across two languages, Taiwanese Mandarin and English. The first function discussed here is sentiment enhancement and the other is sentiment modification. Multilingual language model is adopted for seeing the probability distribution of the text sentiment, and relative entropy is used to quantify the degree of changes. The results support the previous research that emojis are more frequently-used in positive contexts, smileys tend to be used for expressing emotions and prove the language-independent nature of emojis.