Speaker: Marina Zhukova (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Abstract: Emoji use in text messages and social media posts has become prevalent in court materials, but there are no established guidelines for determining their meaning in a given context. The question of interpretation of emojis is complex, as the use of emoji by people with different cultural, sociodemographic, religious, and ethnic backgrounds leads to a wide variety of patterns in emoji use on the Internet. The legal interpretation of emojis presents a challenge due to the potential for a single emoji to convey a range of meanings, the lack of an official dictionary, and the existence of numerous emojis representing facial expressions.
In this talk, I will discuss the results of the experiment aimed to explore the interpretation of emoji in text messages from legal cases. The survey results show that the presence of emojis appear to affect the interpretation of the message. In addition, experimental data show that the presence of emojis in the text message leads to a number of assumptions about the individual’s identity such as age, gender, and personality traits of the author of the message.
About Marina Zhukova: Marina Zhukova is a PhD candidate at the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests cover emojis, motion events, co-speech gestures, lexical typology, language and gender, language and identity, conversational AI. She uses computational and sociocultural linguistic methodologies, coupled with experimental methods to investigate relationships between language and identity, multimodal communication, and emoji use across languages. Marina is a member of the Computational Psycholinguistics for Listening and Speaking Lab and a research affiliate at the Trans Research In Linguistics Lab groups at UC Santa Barbara.
