Receiver Interpretations of Emoji Functions: A Gender Perspective SUSAN HERRING & ASHLEY DAINAS Receiver Interpretations of Emoji Functions: A Gender Perspective INDIANA UNIVERSITY BLOOMINGTON

Interpreting Emoji But … Most research focuses on emoji semantics: emotion/mood/sentiment But … Emotion expression is only one function of emoji Users encounter emoji embedded in contexts-of-use, not in isolation Pragmatic meanings better capture speaker/writer’s communicative intentions than semantics of individual words (emoji) Many of the talks today mention emoji meaning. My background is in linguistics, and Linguists recognize that there are two kinds of meaning: semantics and pragmatics. Most research on emoji understanding has focused on the semantics of individual emoji -- the emotion, mood, or sentiment they express. However, emotion expression is only one function of emoji; they have other pragmatic functions. Moreover, we know that social media users typically encounter emoji embedded in authentic contexts of use, not in isolation. And if we’re interested in what a user intends when they use an emoji, we should be looking at pragmatic meanings, because they better capture …

Gender and Emoji Women use emoji more than men do Emoji (and sticker) use sometimes perceived as “girly” Women and men preferentially use different emoji … … and for different pragmatic reasons (Chen et al., 2017; Konrad et al., in prep.; Sugiyama, 2015; Wolf, 2000) We also know from the literature that gender affects emoji use: …

Research Questions How do social media users interpret the pragmatic functions of emoji in their authentic discourse contexts? Are there gender differences in interpretation of emoji functions? To what extent do users agree among themselves? To what extent do user interpretations agree with researcher interpretations? So, in this research, we ask …

The Understanding Emoji Survey Four content-balanced versions, each with 12 emoji items (modified Facebook comments) + demographic and social media usage questions 13 common emoji types represented, rendered in original format Distributed over six weeks Jan.-Feb. 2018 658 survey responses received; 523 reported gender and responded to at least one emoji item 352 female (Avg.age: 28.9); 121 male (31.8); 50 ‘other’ gender (25.2) 74.2% native English speakers, 75% based in the U.S. We created … An emoji item = one emoji and its local (prior) discourse context Source: 14 graphicon- and media-focused public Facebook groups, starting with challenging instances

Emoji Types and Emoji Included in the Survey

Sample Survey Item

Pragmatic Function Taxonomy Mention (e.g., illustration of text) Reaction Tone Modification Softening* Virtual Action Physical Action* Decorative* Multiple Functions Other “I Don’t Know”* *modified from Herring and Dainas (2017)

Pragmatic Functions by Gender

TONE ACTION SOFTENING REACTION MENTION DECORATIVE TONE – crying, frown, tongue out ACTION – heart, kiss SOFTENING – smile, big smile REACTION – grimace, tears of joy MENTION - kiss MENTION DECORATIVE

PHYSICAL MULTIPLE OTHER “I DON’T KNOW”

Agreement Among Respondents Within-gender percent agreement on most-frequent choice of pragmatic function by emoji type (with number of survey items for each emoji type):

Agreement with Researchers Agreement on most-frequent function code only: 60.4% of survey items (F: 66%, M: 50.9%, O: 64.2%) Number and percentage of questions for which respondents of each gender agreed in their first- or second-most-frequent choice with the authors’ code assignments:

Summary of Findings RQ1: Self-identified females and males mostly agreed in their interpretations ‘Other’ gender respondents differed more from the females and males than the females and males differed from each other

Summary of Findings RQ2 and RQ3: Tone modification is the most common emoji function overall But different emoji tend to specialize in expressing different pragmatic functions Interpretations varied, but respondents agreed among themselves and with the researchers at well above chance levels. All the pragmatic functions were selected as interpretations for emoji use, and each function was selected by a majority for at least some items Validates Herring & Dainas’s (2017) pragmatic function taxonomy … above chance levels, considering both random distribution across the 10 function options and weighted distribution to reflect the overall frequency with which they selected each option.

Interpretations Context is important in interpreting emoji use! Understanding emoji semantics is often insufficient to understand the intended meaning of emoji-containing messages Basic function of emoji has shifted over time from emotion expression to tone modification Women and men appear to have similar cognitive representations of emoji; suggests differences in emoji use are social in nature, e.g., related to identity performances The Other gender category differed demographically and in its social media use, suggesting that user age and media platform may be more important than gender in emoji interpretation

Applications Pragmatic function taxonomy could be used to train a classifier to recognize emoji functions on Facebook Associations between emoji types and functions could assist in identifying those functions Finally, the findings of this research could be applied to automate the identification of the pragmatic meaning of emoji. The Pragmatic function taxonomy (or a modified version of it) could be used … And the associations we identified between … I don’t do machine learning myself, but I’d be happy to discuss these possibilities with anyone who might be interested

Thanks for your attention! herring@indiana.edu ardainas@indiana.edu