Emoticon Style: Interpreting Differences in Emoticons Across Cultures
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Emoticon Style: Interpreting Differences in Emoticons Across Cultures Jaram Park Vladimir Barash Clay Fink Meeyoung Cha Graduate School of Morningside Analytics Johns Hopkins University Graduate School of Culture Technology, KAIST [email protected] Applied Physics Laboratory Culture Technology, KAIST [email protected] clayton.fi[email protected] [email protected] Abstract emotion not captured by language elements alone (Lo 2008; Gajadhar and Green 2005). With the advent of mobile com- Emoticons are a key aspect of text-based communi- cation, and are the equivalent of nonverbal cues to munications, the use of emoticons has become an everyday the medium of online chat, forums, and social media practice for people throughout the world. Interestingly, the like Twitter. As emoticons become more widespread emoticons used by people vary by geography and culture. in computer mediated communication, a vocabulary Easterners, for example employ a vertical style like ^_^, of different symbols with subtle emotional distinctions while westerners employ a horizontal style like :-). This dif- emerges especially across different cultures. In this pa- ference may be due to cultural reasons since easterners are per, we investigate the semantic, cultural, and social as- known to interpret facial expressions from the eyes, while pects of emoticon usage on Twitter and show that emoti- westerners favor the mouth (Yuki, Maddux, and Masuda cons are not limited to conveying a specific emotion 2007; Mai et al. 2011; Jack et al. 2012). or used as jokes, but rather are socio-cultural norms, In this paper, we study emoticon usage on Twitter based whose meaning can vary depending on the identity of the speaker. We also demonstrate how these norms on complete data of tweets from the period 2006 through propagate through the Twitter @-reply network. We 2009, the first three years of this now ubiquitous microblog- confirm our results on a large-scale dataset of over one ging platform. We focus on the macro-level trend first, and billion Tweets from different time periods and coun- examine what emoticons are popular and how they vary tries. stylistically. Next, viewing emoticon usage as a social norm, we study how emoticons differ across cultural boundaries Introduction defined by geography and language. We then contrast what affect categories are associated with emoticons across coun- The most important thing in communication is hearing tries. Moving from the macro-level to the level of user-to- what isn’t said. –Peter Drucker user interactions, we use the Twitter @-reply graph to in- Body language and facial expressions can sometimes tell vestigate the propagation processes of particular emoticons more about what one is trying to express than what one ac- over social links, and study how the diffusion characteristics tually says in face-to-face interactions. Changes in vocal of emoticons can help us understand which emoticons have intonation can serve a similar purpose in exclusively spoken broader appeal in a new cultural setting. communications. Such cues take up an estimated 93% of ev- We make several interesting findings: eryday communication (Mehrabian 1971) and help people 1. Emoticons are generally used in positive and light con- better communicate complex emotions like humor, doubt, text, and as a result tweets containing extremely angry or and sarcasm. In text-based communication, however, these anxious sentiment rarely accompanied emoticons. cues are not present and their absence can result in misunder- standing and confusion. The growth in computer-mediated 2. Users continuously expand the meanings of emoticons communications has led to the use of conventions where by adopting variants of the normative forms such as :) emotion or affect is referenced pictorially using alphanumer- with pictorial representations of facial features such as ics, punctuations, or other characters. These symbolic repre- winks ;), forehead =:), and nose :-). These variants are sentations are commonly referred to as emoticons (Walther sometimes associated with different kinds of affect than and D’addario 2001). their normative forms. The origin of emoticons is of dispute—especially for the 3. While geography matters in determining the emoticon basic smiley :)—but most studies suggest that they appeared style, language has a higher impact. In the Philippines and in the early 1980s and have since gained massive popular- Indonesia, where English is in common usage along with ity (Derks, Bos, and Grumbkow 2007). Emoticons, like local languages, users utilized horizontal style emoticons nonverbal cues, help people interpret the nuance of mean- as in predominantly English speaking countries. ing, the attitude of a conversational partner, and the level of 4. European users were multi-cultural in terms of emoticon Copyright c 2013, Association for the Advancement of Artificial usage with both vertical and horizontal styles being em- Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. ployed in tweets. 5. While popular emoticons like :) and :( are adopted either the dynamic matched sample approach in (Aral, Muchink, spontaneously or through sources outside of Twitter, less and Sundararajan 2009). Our formal approach is motivated popular ones like :P, ^^ and T_T had higher chance of dif- by models studying the effects of triadic closure in Twit- fusion through the Twitter’s @-reply friendship relation- ter (Romero et al. 2011). ship. This diffusion may be due to influence, and occurs almost entirely within cultural boundaries. Methodology The remainder of this paper is as follows. We start by Twitter Data We use a corpus of the Twitter data in (Cha briefly reviewing the relevant literature. We then describe et al. 2010) from 2006 to 2009, which contains information the Twitter dataset and our method for extracting emoticons about 54 million users and all of their public posts. Since we from tweets. The next section presents the basic analysis of are interested in studying cultural differences, we tried to in- emoticons in Twitter, followed by cultural boundaries and clude both eastern and western countries that had significant diffusion processes of emoticons. Finally we discuss impli- Twitter populations. We classified users and their tweets into cations of findings and conclude. our list of countries based on their geo-location (Kulshrestha et al. 2012) and excluded some countries such as Brazil due Related Work to difficulty in processing their language. Table 1 shows the Emoticons are a crucial part of computer-mediated commu- list of countries that we focus on in this study and their pop- nication (Walther and D’addario 2001). Previous work con- ulation proportion within the Twitter corpus. firmed that users reading text messages with emoticons are significantly better at interpreting the precise meaning of the Country Language Culture Population author than those reading messages without emoticons (Lo US English Western 57.74% 2008; Gajadhar and Green 2005). Emoticons are known to UK English Western 7.33% be used more frequently in socio-emotional contexts than in Canada English Western 3.91% task-oriented contexts (Derks, Bos, and Grumbkow 2007). Australia English Western 2.62% Recent work similarly demonstrated that Twitter users are Germany German Western 2.12% more likely to use emoticons when conversing with others Indonesia English Eastern 1.46% than when posting status updates (Schnoebelen 2012). Emo- Japan Japanese Eastern 1.45% tional valence has been shown to match well, as positive Netherlands Dutch Western 1.16% emoticons were used more in positive contexts and nega- Philippines English Eastern 0.97% tive emoticons, more in negative contexts. However, emoti- France French Western 0.83% con usage decreased when people felt extreme emotions of Italy Italian Western 0.65% anger or guilt, showing a tendency to drop emoticons for Spain Spanish Western 0.62% emotionally intense situations (Kato, Kato, and Scott 2009). Mexico Spanish Western 0.52% Several studies focused on emoticon usages across dif- Singapore English Eastern 0.48% ferent cultures. One study comparing Japanese and Ameri- South Korea Korean Eastern 0.30% can emoticons based on e-mail data found that the functions Total data analyzed: 10 million users and 1.1 billion tweets of emoticons were different (Markman and Oshima 2007). American emoticons primarily established punctuation, sig- Table 1: List of countries and their data studied nature, and closing of a sentence, while Japanese emoticons often had more complex shapes, mimicking offline facial Extracting Emoticons We limited our focus to only those expressions. Another study based on SMS data confirmed emoticons expressing human facial cues, and compiled a list that emoticon usages varied by the gender of users, while no of candidate emoticons from a number of sources including relationship was found across different strengths of social the Wikipedia1. Based on the compiled list, we constructed ties (Tossell et al. 2012). regular expressions to search our dataset. When considering emoticons as a social norm, it is cru- As mentioned earlier, eastern and western countries em- cial to consider the effects of influence and homophily. If ployed different emoticon styles, as highlighted in Table 2. we assume that the usage of a particular emoticon (or a The horizontal style, popularly used in western countries, set of emoticons) falls under the culture—what is called emphasizes the mouth for expressing emotion and com- or “beliefs, attitudes and behaviors”—then