How to Do Things without Words: Modeling Semantic Drift of Emoji
This work addresses the challenge of understanding semantic drift in emoji for computational linguistics and communication studies, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing frameworks for semantic drift.
The paper tackles the problem of modeling the evolving meaning of emoji, addressing semantic drift through analysis of features that contribute to this evolution, with some features unique to emoji and others more general.
Emoji have become a significant part of our informal textual communication. Previous work addressing the societal and linguistic functions of emoji overlook the evolving meaning of the symbol. This evolution could be addressed through the framework of semantic drifts. In this paper we model and analyze the semantic drift of emoji and discuss the features that may be contributing to the drift, some are unique to emoji and some are more general.