Title: Spice up Your Chat: The Intentions and Sentiment Effects of Using Emoji,
Abstract: Emojis, as a new way of conveying nonverbal cues, are widely adopted in
computer-mediated communications. In this paper, first from a message sender
perspective, we focus on people's motives in using four types of emojis --
positive, neutral, negative, and non-facial. We compare the willingness levels
of using these emoji types for seven typical intentions that people usually
apply nonverbal cues for in communication. The results of extensive statistical
hypothesis tests not only report the popularities of the intentions, but also
uncover the subtle differences between emoji types in terms of intended uses.
Second, from a perspective of message recipients, we further study the
sentiment effects of emojis, as well as their duplications, on verbal messages.
Different from previous studies in emoji sentiment, we study the sentiments of
emojis and their contexts as a whole. The experiment results indicate that the
powers of conveying sentiment are different between four emoji types, and the
sentiment effects of emojis vary in the contexts of different valences.