Arabic Emoji Sentiment Lexicon (Arab-ESL): A Comparison between Arabic and European Emoji Sentiment Lexicons

Shatha Ali A. Hakami, Robert Hendley, Phillip Smith


Abstract
Emoji (the popular digital pictograms) are sometimes seen as a new kind of artificial and universally usable and consistent writing code. In spite of their assumed universality, there is some evidence that the sense of an emoji, specifically in regard to sentiment, may change from language to language and culture to culture. This paper investigates whether contextual emoji sentiment analysis is consistent across Arabic and European languages. To conduct this investigation, we, first, created the Arabic emoji sentiment lexicon (Arab-ESL). Then, we exploited an existing European emoji sentiment lexicon to compare the sentiment conveyed in each of the two families of language and culture (Arabic and European). The results show that the pairwise correlation between the two lexicons is consistent for emoji that represent, for instance, hearts, facial expressions, and body language. However, for a subset of emoji (those that represent objects, nature, symbols, and some human activities), there are large differences in the sentiment conveyed. More interestingly, an extremely high level of inconsistency has been shown with food emoji.
Anthology ID:
2021.wanlp-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Kyiv, Ukraine (Virtual)
Editors:
Nizar Habash, Houda Bouamor, Hazem Hajj, Walid Magdy, Wajdi Zaghouani, Fethi Bougares, Nadi Tomeh, Ibrahim Abu Farha, Samia Touileb
Venue:
WANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
60–71
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wanlp-1.7
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shatha Ali A. Hakami, Robert Hendley, and Phillip Smith. 2021. Arabic Emoji Sentiment Lexicon (Arab-ESL): A Comparison between Arabic and European Emoji Sentiment Lexicons. In Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, pages 60–71, Kyiv, Ukraine (Virtual). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Arabic Emoji Sentiment Lexicon (Arab-ESL): A Comparison between Arabic and European Emoji Sentiment Lexicons (Hakami et al., WANLP 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wanlp-1.7.pdf