Emoji2021 - 4th
International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media
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.
