Emoji 2018 - Emoji2018: 1st​ International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media

With the rise of social media, emoji have become an extremely popular form of communication in social media. They are equally popular across major social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. As of 2017, Facebook and Facebook Messenger process over 60 million and 6 billion messages with emoji per day, respectively. In 2015, Instagram reported that nearly half of the photo comments posted on Instagram contains emoji and Instagram users tend to replace slang terms using emoji in photo comments. Another study revealed that emoji are slowly taking over emoticons on Twitter. Emoji data generated on social media sites have been utilized to study how emoji are used across different languages, cultures, user communities and as features to learn machine learning models to solve problems that span across many applications, including sentiment analysis, emotion analysis, and sarcasm detection. 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. Thus, Emoji tries to bring together computer and social science researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry to discuss and exchange ideas on understanding social, cultural, communicative, and linguistic roles of emoji while leading the discussions on building novel computational methods to understand and interpret them.
Emoji is focused on research and discussions on challenges in emoji understanding, including but not limited to the following research directions.
Challenges in interpreting the meaning of an emoji in a message context
Novel methods for emoji sense disambiguation
Novel methods for calculating emoji similarity
Novel methods for emoji prediction
Challenges in using emoji as a language
Emoji’s effects on the evolution of language constructs used on social media such as emoticons and slang terms
Common emoji usages in social media
Cultural and community-specific emoji meaning evolution and interpretation
Why emoji meanings change over time and across communities?
Distinct social and communicative roles of emoji
How do people come to understandings of the meanings of the emoji?
Understanding sender intention and receiver interpretation of emoji
Emoji rendering and interface design challenges
Applications of emoji in social media
Research related to other pictorial representations such as emotes, customized emoji (e.g., bitmoji), and animated gifs