4th International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media
Co-located with The 15th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM)
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 the 4th of a series of emoji understanding workshops conducted by the organizers. The 1st emoji understanding workshop, Emoji
, was the best-attended workshop at ICWSM 2018 (with 35 attendees) that was extended from a half-day to a full-day due to the quality and quantity of submissions received and the expressed interest. 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 article 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 talks. The workshop ran for a half-day and attracted more than 40 participants. The third emoji understanding workshop, Emoji, was co-located with ICWSM 2020. It attracted 63 registered participants where Emojination and Adobe Inc. sponsored twenty of them with their workshop registration fees. The workshop program consisted of a keynote speech, an invited talk, and five research paper presentations. To minimize the effect of not having an opportunity to network in-person due to the online nature of this workshop, an hour long virtual networking event was conducted at the end of the workshop which attracted lively participation.
Paper Submission: March 27th, 2021 (23:59, anywhere on earth). EasyChair paper submission system is here.
Author Notification: April 10th, 2021.
Camera-ready Papers Due: April 17th, 2021.
Workshop Day: June 7th, 2021.
02-04-2021: Emoji EasyChair paper submission system is online 
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02-03-2021: Emoji Workshop Website is online .
01-30-2021: Emoji workshop was accepted at ICWSM 2021 
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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.
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.
We invite regular technical papers (10 pages), short papers (4 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 AAAI two-column template for formatting. A high-resolution PDF of the paper should be uploaded to the EasyChair submission site before the paper submission deadline. More information on paper submission guidelines can be found here.
Paper Submission: March 27th, 2021 (23:59, anywhere on earth). EasyChair paper submission system is here.
Author Notification: April 10th, 2021.
Camera-ready Papers Due: April 17th, 2021.
Workshop Day: June 7th, 2021.
Final workshop program will be available soon.
Below, we provide links to proceedings of the previous runs of this emoji workshop.
Previous Runs of the Emoji Workshop
, was held in conjunction with with The 12th 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/.
, 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.
, was held online in conjunction with with The 14th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-20). The workshop attracted more than 60 attendees representing many disciplines. The workshop program included a keynote, a total of 6 paper presentations (4 long papers and 1 short papers) including 1 invited talk and an optional networking session. The workshop proceedings are available here.
