On the Context-Free Ambiguity of Emoji

TL;DR

This study investigates the ambiguity of emojis in isolation by collecting human interpretations, revealing that most emojis have varying levels of ambiguity influenced by their symbolic meanings, with implications for design.

Contribution

The paper provides the first large-scale crowdsourced dataset of emoji interpretations in isolation and analyzes their ambiguity levels, highlighting factors influencing clarity.

Findings

16 emojis are completely unambiguous with 30 annotations

55 emojis are highly ambiguous, indistinguishable from random descriptions

Symbolic meaning influences emoji ambiguity levels

Abstract

Emojis come with prepacked semantics making them great candidates to create new forms of more accessible communications. Yet, little is known about how much of this emojis semantic is agreed upon by humans, outside of textual contexts. Thus, we collected a crowdsourced dataset of one-word emoji descriptions for 1,289 emojis presented to participants with no surrounding text. The emojis and their interpretations were then examined for ambiguity. We find that with 30 annotations per emoji, 16 emojis (1.2%) are completely unambiguous, whereas 55 emojis (4.3%) are so ambiguous that their descriptions are indistinguishable from randomly chosen descriptions. Most of studied emojis are spread out between the two extremes. Furthermore, investigating the ambiguity of different types of emojis, we find that an important factor is the extent to which an emoji has an embedded symbolical meaning drawn from an established code-book of symbols. We conclude by discussing design implications.