How Cosmopolitan Are Emojis?: Exploring Emojis Usage and Meaning over Different Languages with Distributional Semantics

TL;DR: The results suggest that the overall semantics of the subset of the emojis the authors studied is preserved across all the languages they analysed, however, some emoj is interpreted in a different way from language to language, and this could be related to socio-geographical differences.

Abstract: Choosing the right emoji to visually complement or condense 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 pictures are the same independently of where we live, but they can be interpreted and used in different ways. In this paper we compare the meaning and the usage of emojis across different languages. Our results suggest that the overall semantics of the subset of the emojis we studied is preserved across all the languages we analysed. However, some emojis are interpreted in a different way from language to language, and this could be related to socio-geographical differences.