Understanding Emoji Ambiguity in Context: The Role of Text in Emoji-Related Miscommunication † Hannah Miller*, Daniel Kluver*, Jacob Thebault-Spieker*, Loren Terveen* and Brent Hecht *GroupLens Research, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA {hmiller, kluver, thebault, terveen}@cs.umn.edu †People, Space, and Algorithms (PSA) Computing Group, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA
[email protected] Abstract and tightly-closed eyes” renders as this pictograph on Recent studies have found that people interpret emoji charac- Microsoft Windows devices but as this pictograph on ters inconsistently, creating significant potential for miscom- Apple devices. Emojipedia currently tracks 19 platforms munication. However, this research examined emoji in isola- with their own emoji fonts (“Emojipedia” 2017). Moreover, tion, without consideration of any surrounding text. Prior platforms update their emoji fonts just as they update their work has hypothesized that examining emoji in their natural textual contexts would substantially reduce the observed po- operating systems and, as such, emoji fonts are actually plat- tential for miscommunication. To investigate this hypothesis, form-version specific, not just platform-specific. For in- we carried out a controlled study with 2,482 participants who stance, this pictograph shows how emoji character interpreted emoji both in isolation and in multiple textual U+1F606 was rendered in previous Microsoft implementa- contexts. After comparing the variability of emoji interpreta- tions of the Unicode standard. This means, for example, that tion in each condition, we found that our results do not sup- port the hypothesis in prior work: when emoji are interpreted the emoji rendering a Twitter user chooses and sees when in textual contexts, the potential for miscommunication ap- they compose a tweet (on one version of a platform) may pears to be roughly the same.