June 8th, 2020 from 9.00 AM - 12.30 PM

Emoji

3rd​ International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media
Co-located with The 14th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM)

OVERVIEW

Pictographs, commonly referred to as "emoji", have become a popular way to enhance electronic communication. With their introduction in the late 1990's, emoji have been widely used to enhance the sentiment, emotion, and sarcasm expressed in social media messages. They often play distinct social and communicative roles compared to other forms of written language while taking over language constructs such as slang terms and emoticons. The ability to automatically process, derive meaning and interpret text fused with emoji will be essential as society embraces emoji as a standard form of online communication. Yet the pictorial nature of emoji, the fact that (the same) emoji may be used in different contexts to express different meanings, and that emoji are used in different cultures and communities over the world who interpret emoji differently, make it especially difficult to apply traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to analyze them. To meet these challenges, Emoji aims to stimulate research on understanding social, cultural, communicative, and linguistic roles of emoji and developing novel computational approaches to analyze, interpret and understand emoji and their usage in social media applications. It will provide a forum to bring together researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry in the areas of computer science, social network analysis and mining, natural language processing, computational linguistics, human-computer interaction, and computational social sciences to discuss high-quality research and emerging applications, to exchange ideas and experience, and to identify new opportunities for collaboration.

Emoji is a follow up to one of the best-attended workshops at ICWSM 2018 that was extended from a half-day to a full day due to the quality and quantity of submissions received and the expressed interest. Emoji, which was the the first workshop in this series involved a truly interdisciplinary (computer science, linguistics, computational social science, anthropology, law, and marketing) and highly engaging participation covering a balanced representation from academia and industry. It attracted 18 submissions, including 14 long papers and 4 short papers. A total of 8 papers (6 long papers and 2 short papers) were accepted for the final workshop program and it also included a keynote presentation, a tutorial, and a highly interdisciplinary panel on "The Challenges in Emoji Understanding" that provided an animated and engaging forum to the attendees to discuss the open emoji research problems with leading researchers and practitioners. The workshop program was covered in a WIRED.com which can be accessed online at https://www.wired.com/story/academic-emoji-conference/. The second emoji understanding workshop, Emoji, was co-located with The Web Conference 2019 (formerly, The World Wide Web Conference). It attracted 11 submissions, including 7 full papers and 4 short papers, out of which, 6 papers were accepted for presentation. The workshop program also consisted of a keynote presentation and three invited talsks. The workshop ran for a half-day and attracted more than 40 participants.

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper Submission: April 15th, 2020 (23:59, anywhere on earth). EasyChair paper submission system is here
Author Notification: May 1st, 2020.
Camera-ready Papers Due: May 8th, 2020.
Workshop Day: June 8th, 2020.


NEWS

05-19-2020: Emoji workshop will be held on the 8th of June 2020, from 9.00 AM EST to 12.30 PM EST as an online meeting due to the COVID-19 pandemic. All registered participants will be sent a meeting invitation to join the workshop remotely. You can register for the workshop here (Regular - $45, Student - $25).
03-07-2020: Emoji EasyChair paper submission system is online .
03-06-2020: Emoji Workshop Website is online .
02-22-2020: Emoji workshop was accepted at ICWSM 2020 .

CALL FOR PAPERS

With the rise of social media, emoji have become an extremely popular form of communication in social media. They are equally popular across major social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. In 2018, Facebook reported that over 700 million messages with emoji are shared on their platform every day while over 900 million emoji are sent in Facebook Messenger without any text content every day. In the same year, Twitter reported that it processed 250 million emoji per month. In 2015, Instagram reported that nearly half of the photo comments posted on Instagram contain emoji and Instagram users tend to replace slang terms using emoji in photo comments. Another study revealed that emoji are slowly taking over emoticons on Twitter. Emoji data generated on social media sites have been utilized to study how emoji are used across different languages, cultures, user communities and as features to learn machine learning models to solve problems that span across many applications, including sentiment analysis, emotion analysis, and sarcasm detection. The ability to automatically process, derive meaning, and interpret text fused with emoji will be essential as society embraces emoji as a standard form of online communication. Thus, Emoji tries to bring together computer and social science researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry to discuss and exchange ideas on understanding social, cultural, communicative, and linguistic roles of emoji while leading the discussions on building novel computational methods to understand and interpret them.

Emoji is focused on research and discussions on challenges in emoji understanding, including but not limited to the following research directions.

  1. Challenges in interpreting the meaning of an emoji in a message context
  2. Novel methods for emoji sense disambiguation
  3. Novel methods for calculating emoji similarity
  4. Novel methods for emoji prediction
  5. Emoji-based retrieval and search
  6. Challenges in using emoji as a language
  7. Emoji’s effects on the evolution of language constructs used on social media such as emoticons and slang terms
  8. Common emoji usages in social media
  9. Cultural and community-specific emoji meaning evolution and interpretation
  10. Distinct social and communicative roles of emoji
  11. Understanding sender intention and receiver interpretation of emoji
  12. Emoji rendering and interface design challenges
  13. Applications of emoji in social media
  14. Emoji and the Law
  15. Research related to other pictorial representations such as emoticons, stickers, kaomoji, emotes, customized emoji (e.g., bitmoji), and animated gifs

We encourage submissions (full research papers, short papers, and demo proposals) that utilize quantitative, qualitative and mixed research methods to approach the above challenges as contributions. For more information on how to prepare and submit papers including LaTeX templates, submission website etc., please check the paper submission instructions below.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

We invite regular technical papers (10 pages), short papers (5 pages), and demo proposals (2 page). Submissions must be original and should not have been published previously or be under consideration for publication while being evaluated for this workshop. Submissions will be evaluated by the program committee based on the quality of the work and its fit to the workshop themes. All submissions should be double-blind and use the Emoji2020 LaTeX template (based on CEUR-WS templates) for formatting. A high-resolution PDF of the paper should be uploaded to the EasyChair submission site before the paper submission deadline.

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper Submission: April 15th, 2020 (23:59, anywhere on earth). EasyChair paper submission system is here
Author Notification: May 1st, 2020.
Camera-ready Papers Due: May 8th, 2020.
Workshop Day: June 8th, 2020.



ORGANIZATION

Organizing Committee

Program Committee

Website and Content Management

WORKSHOP PROGRAM


Final workshop program including all accepted papers is listed below. Please note that all times are in EST (Eastern Standard Time).

Time (EST)

Talk Description

9.00 AM - 9.10 AM

Introduction

9.10 AM - 10.00 AM

Keynote 1 - Spice up Your Chat and Beyond: The Intentions, Effects, and Personal Patterns of Using Emojis
Speaker - Jiebo Luo (Professor, University of Rochester, USA)


Jiebo Luo
Professor
University of Rochester
USA

Emojis, as a popular way of conveying nonverbal cues, are widely adopted in computer-mediated communications. In this talk, first from a message sender perspective, we focus on people's motives in using four types of emojis – positive, neutral, negative, and non-facial. We compare the willingness levels of using these emoji types for seven typical intentions that people usually apply nonverbal cues for in communication. The results of extensive statistical hypothesis tests not only report the popularities of the intentions, but also uncover the subtle differences between emoji types in terms of intended uses. Next, from a perspective of message recipients, we further study the sentiment effects of emojis, as well as their duplications, on verbal messages. Different from previous studies in emoji sentiment, we study the sentiments of emojis and their contexts as a whole and show that the powers of conveying sentiment are different between four emoji types, and the sentiment effects of emojis vary in the contexts of different valences. We will also cover related topics ranging from Twitter sentiment analysis with emoji embedding, predicting emoji usage, to mining the relationship between emoji usage patterns and personality.

10.00 AM - 10.20 AM

Word-Emoji Embeddings from Large Scale Messaging Data Reflect Real World Semantic Associations of Expressive Icons
Jens Helge Reelfs, Oliver Hohlfeld, Markus Strohmaier and Niklas Henckell
[Download Paper]

10.20 AM - 10.40 AM

Animoji Adoption and Use: Gender Associations with an Emergent Technology
Susan C. Herring, Ashley Dainas, Holly Lopez-Long and Ying Tang
[Download Paper]

10.40 AM - 11.00 AM

Coffee Break

11.00 AM - 11.50 AM

Keynote 2 - Why do Machines Struggle to Understand Emoji?
Speaker - Francesco Barbieri (Research Scientist, Snap Inc., USA)


Francesco Barbieri
Research Scientist
Snap Inc.
USA

In this talk I will present studies on emoji semantics and explore why these models struggle to represent emoji properly. The main problem with emoji automatic understanding, is that emoji are not used in the same way across different social media users, or different periods of the year. I will also show studies on emoji biases, and finish by talking about the biggest limitation of emoji usage: personalization.

11.50 AM - 12.00 PM

What’s Behind those Smiling Eyes: Examining Emoji Sentiment Across Vendors
Ashley Shurick and Jennifer Daniel
[Download Paper]

12.00 PM - 12.20 PM

The Anatomy of Memetic Stickers: An Analysis of Sticker Competition on Chinese Social Media
Jing Ge
[Download Paper]

12.20 PM - 12.30 PM

Do Emoji Sequences Have a Preferred Word Order?
Susan Herring and Jing Ge
[Download Paper]

12.30 PM - 1.00 PM

Closing Remarks and Networking (Optional)

WORKSHOP REGISTRATION


Emoji workshop will be held on the 8th of June 2020, from 9.00 AM EST to 12.30 PM EST as an online meeting due to the COVID-19 pandemic. All registered participants will be sent a meeting invitation to join the workshop remotely. You can register for the workshop here (Regular - $45, Student - $25).

PREVIOUS WORKSHOPS


Below, we provide links to proceedings of the previous runs of this emoji workshop.

Previous Runs of the Emoji Workshop

  1. The 1st emoji workshop, titled Emoji, was held in conjunction with with The 12​th​ International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-18). The workshop attracted more than 35 attendees representing many disciplines. The workshop program included a keynote, a tutorial, a total of 8 paper presentations (6 long papers and 2 short papers), and a panel discussion which lead by leading researchers and practitioners. The workshop proceedings are available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2130/.

  2. The 2nd emoji workshop, titled Emoji, was held in conjunction with with The Web Conference 2019 (formerly, The World Wide Web Conference). The workshop attracted more than 40 attendees representing many disciplines. The workshop program included a keynote, a total of 9 paper presentations (5 long papers and 1 short papers) including 3 invited talks from the leading researchers in the industry and academia. The workshop proceedings are available here.

SPONSORS


We are extremely thankful for Adobe for partnering with Emojination to sponsoring the Emoji workshop this year.