A systematic review of trends and gaps in the production of scientific knowledge on the sociopolitical impacts of emojis in computer-mediated communication.

This systematic literature review analyses trends in original research on emoji use in computer-mediated communications (CMC) published between 2011 to 2021. In total, 823 articles were identified that met the search criteria. The mixedmethod approach included qualitative coding of articles and frequency analysis by year, impact quartile, research topic and multidisciplinarity, as well as a cluster analysis to examine trends in sociopolitical research. The results show that Computer Science, Communications and Social Sciences disciplines accounted for largest proportion of original research on emojis and CMC in the time period analysed and that the degree of scientific impact increased significantly across the time series. In recent years, sociopolitical research has had higher than average growth and can be clustered into various groups based on two broad objects of study: “culture-identity” and “social exclusion”. The study also identified significant knowledge gaps, particularly in relation to emoji standardization and its sociopolitical implications. Overall, multidisciplinary approaches are epistemologically constrained, Spanish-language production is low, and there is an almost complete absence of context appropriate methodologies. The study concludes that there is a need to for more sociopolitical research on emoji use in CMC and multidisciplinary approaches, a shift away from the hegemony of Anglocentrism, and greater questioning of the structural influences of standardization process on questions of cultural, identity and social exclusion.post-print2114 K

Emojis and the Law

Emojis are an increasingly important way we express ourselves. Though emojis may be cute and fun, their usage can lead to misunderstandings with significant legal stakes—such as whether someone should be obligated by contract, liable for sexual harassment, or sent to jail. Our legal system has substantial experience interpreting new forms of content, so it should be equipped to handle emojis. Nevertheless, some special attributes of emojis create extra interpretative challenges. This Article identifies those attributes and proposes how courts should handle them. One particularly troublesome interpretative challenge arises from the different ways platforms depict emojis that are nominally standardized through the Unicode Consortium. These differences can unexpectedly create misunderstandings. The diversity of emoji depictions is not technologically required, nor does it necessarily benefit users. Instead, it likely reflects platforms’ concerns about intellectual property protection for emojis, which forces them to introduce unnecessary variations that create avoidable confusion. Thus, intellectual property may be hindering our ability to communicate with each other. This Article will discuss how to limit this unwanted consequence

Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things 3/E

Among species, human beings seem to be a peculiar lot. Why is it, for example, that certain members of the species routinely put their survival at risk by puffing on a small stick of nicotine? Why is it that some females of the species make locomotion difficult for themselves by donning high-heel footwear? Are there hidden or unconscious reasons behind such strange behaviors that seem to be so utterly counter-instinctual, so to speak? For no manifest biological reason, humanity has always searched, and continues to search, for a purpose to its life. Is it this search that has led it to engage in such bizarre behaviors as smoking and wearing high heels? And is it the reason behind humanity’s invention of myths, art, rituals, languages, mathematics, science, and all the other truly remarkable things that set it apart from all other species? Clearly, Homo sapiens appears to be unique in the fact that many of its behaviors are shaped by forces other than the instincts. The discipline that endeavors to understand these forces is known as semiotics. Relatively unknown in comparison to, say, philosophy or psychology, semiotics probes the human condition in its own peculiar way, by unraveling the meanings of the signs that undergird not only the wearing of high-heel shoes, but also the construction of words, paintings, sculptures, and the like

Literacies of Bilingual Youth: A Profile of Bilingual Academic, Social, and TXT Literacies

This dissertation identifies three types of language skills that urban Spanish/English bilingual youth possess (academic, social, and texting language), and reports on their relationship while documenting and analyzing the features of text messaging among this population. The participants in this study are Spanish-dominant bilingual young adults enrolled in a high school completion program in New York City. They are in the process of developing both Spanish and English academic literacy skills, and it is well known that they tend to perform below the grade they are enrolled in. For this reason, they are often referred to as being “language-less” (DeCapua & Marshall, 2011; Freeman, Freeman, & Mercuri, 2002) in an academic setting. Yet, little was previously known about their linguistic skills in other language forms such as social and Txt. This research seeks to understand and document their abilities across language forms and modalities, painting a composite picture of non-traditional bilinguals students’ linguistic skills. The aims of this dissertation are achieved through three different approaches. The first is a quantitative study into participants’ literacy skills through the use of assessments measuring academic literacy and social language awareness across written, aural, and digital modalities. The second is an in-depth analysis of the features participants use when texting (communicating via SMS and iMessage). Txt is a relatively new language form, and the analysis presented in this dissertation identifies the features and patterns that illustrate its systematic and constrained nature. The third approach is a case study focused on the texting behavior between two prolific texters. The theories developed based on the texting patterns of all participants (except those two texters) are applied to this one conversation for validation. This conversation constitutes more than half of the text messages that students contributed to the project, highlighting just how important this language form is in the daily life of young adults. A final component of this dissertation is the public availability of the text messages as an anonymized corpus along with the code and methods used to analyze the data. The text message corpus is available at www.byts.commons.gc.cuny.ed

Gendered discourses and discursive strategies employed in Twitter-hashtagged debates about Saudi-women’s issues

This study is motivated by Twitter’s growing popularity as a space where Saudi men and women discuss issues pertaining to their lives without being stigmatised in an otherwise gender-segregated society. It aims to shed light on the multiple perspectives adopted by them to reveal an existing tension between tradition and modernity in SA (Yamani, 2000). Adopting an eclectic qualitative method, I draw from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) tools to analyse the constellation of discourses that are related to gender and the discursive strategies used as resources for stance taking in a corpus of 1000 unique text-based tweets derived from two selected topical hashtags collected in June, 2015. These two hashtags mark the public reaction to a) newly-announced travel controls for Saudi women and b) statistics about the percentages of unmarried Saudi women. in. The data provides evidence that voices of difference, protest, and dissent regarding women’s rights and their social role are in a dialogic relation with dominant conservative discourses. The analysis reveals that hashtag contributors mainly engage in the evaluation of gendered discourses, epitomised by a predominant Discourse of Patriarchy, and a Discourse of Gender Equality and Human Rights. A Discourse of Patriarchy manifests in two mutually-supporting discourses: a discourse of dominance that privileges men and gives them control over women, and a discourse about the subordination of women. The Discourse of Gender Equality discusses women’s retrieval of their full citizenship status, without the need for guardianship, and an equal social respect for their life choices, including those related to marriage and mobility. While drawing on these discourses, contributors position themselves on a spectrum of conservative (anti-change) and progressive (pro-change) stances. By way of critiquing them, and sometimes, constructing new democratic social worldviews, the contributors show signs of engaging in a form of linguistic intervention to promote social change. Invocations of these discourses were manipulated for the macro-functions of perpetuating, undermining, or transforming existing discriminatory practices against women. Within these macro-strategies, other meso-discursive strategies were employed, namely referential and predicational strategies, assimilation and differentiation, legitimation and delegitimation, intensification and mitigation, and humour. These meso-strategies were fulfilled drawing on linguistic and semantic means including sarcasm, laughter, mock suggestions, comparison, metaphors, etc. I argue that the identified patterns found in the Twitter data reflect as well as facilitate (on the discursive level) an ongoing gradual social change in the Saudi society since the unheard can now be heard and the dominant social practices involving women are being presented for public deliberation. In addition to contributing to the Arabic literature on discourse and gender, this study engages in an act of historicising these changes in SA and provides an assessment of the transformative potential of Twitter

Attention Restraint, Working Memory Capacity, and Mind Wandering: Do Emotional Valence or Intentionality Matter?

Attention restraint appears to mediate the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and mind wandering (Kane et al., 2016). Prior work has identifed two dimensions of mind wandering—emotional valence and intentionality. However, less is known about how WMC and attention restraint correlate with these dimensions. Te current study examined the relationship between WMC, attention restraint, and mind wandering by emotional valence and intentionality. A confrmatory factor analysis demonstrated that WMC and attention restraint were strongly correlated, but only attention restraint was related to overall mind wandering, consistent with prior fndings. However, when examining the emotional valence of mind wandering, attention restraint and WMC were related to negatively and positively valenced, but not neutral, mind wandering. Attention restraint was also related to intentional but not unintentional mind wandering. Tese results suggest that WMC and attention restraint predict some, but not all, types of mind wandering

Sentiment Analysis of Twitter Data

The rapid expansion and acceptance of social media has opened doors into users’ opinions and perceptions that were never as accessible as they are with today\u27s prevalence of mobile technology. Harvested data, analyzed for opinions and sentiment can provide powerful insight into a population. This research utilizes Twitter data due to its widespread global use, in order to examine the sentiment associated with tweets. An approach utilizing Twitter #hashtags and Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling were utilized to differentiate between tweet topics. A lexicographical dictionary was then utilized to classify sentiment. This method provides a framework for an analyst to ingest Twitter data, conduct an analysis and provide insight into the sentiment contained within the data

The Skipped Beat: A Study of Sociopragmatic Understanding in LLMs for 64 Languages

Instruction tuned large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, demonstrate remarkable performance in a wide range of tasks. Despite numerous recent studies that examine the performance of instruction-tuned LLMs on various NLP benchmarks, there remains a lack of comprehensive investigation into their ability to understand cross-lingual sociopragmatic meaning (SM), i.e., meaning embedded within social and interactive contexts. This deficiency arises partly from SM not being adequately represented in any of the existing benchmarks. To address this gap, we present SPARROW, an extensive multilingual benchmark specifically designed for SM understanding. SPARROW comprises 169 datasets covering 13 task types across six primary categories (e.g., anti-social language detection, emotion recognition). SPARROW datasets encompass 64 different languages originating from 12 language families representing 16 writing scripts. We evaluate the performance of various multilingual pretrained language models (e.g., mT5) and instruction-tuned LLMs (e.g., BLOOMZ, ChatGPT) on SPARROW through fine-tuning, zero-shot, and/or few-shot learning. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that existing open-source instruction tuned LLMs still struggle to understand SM across various languages, performing close to a random baseline in some cases. We also find that although ChatGPT outperforms many LLMs, it still falls behind task-specific finetuned models with a gap of 12.19 SPARROW score. Our benchmark is available at: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/SPARROWComment: Accepted by EMNLP 2023 Main conferenc