No Arabic abstract
The semantics of emoji has, to date, been considered from a static perspective. We offer the first longitudinal study of how emoji semantics changes over time, applying techniques from computational linguistics to six years of Twitter data. We identify five patterns in emoji semantic development and find evidence that the less abstract an emoji is, the more likely it is to undergo semantic change. In addition, we analyse select emoji in more detail, examining the effect of seasonality and world events on emoji semantics. To aid future work on emoji and semantics, we make our data publicly available along with a web-based interface that anyone can use to explore semantic change in emoji.
While there is a large amount of research in the field of Lexical Semantic Change Detection, only few approaches go beyond a standard benchmark evaluation of existing models. In this paper, we propose a shift of focus from change detection to change discovery, i.e., discovering novel word senses over time from the full corpus vocabulary. By heavily fine-tuning a type-based and a token-based approach on recently published German data, we demonstrate that both models can successfully be applied to discover new words undergoing meaning change. Furthermore, we provide an almost fully automated framework for both evaluation and discovery.
This paper describes the Duluth UROP systems that participated in SemEval--2018 Task 2, Multilingual Emoji Prediction. We relied on a variety of ensembles made up of classifiers using Naive Bayes, Logistic Regression, and Random Forests. We used unigram and bigram features and tried to offset the skewness of the data through the use of oversampling. Our task evaluation results place us 19th of 48 systems in the English evaluation, and 5th of 21 in the Spanish. After the evaluation we realized that some simple changes to preprocessing could significantly improve our results. After making these changes we attained results that would have placed us sixth in the English evaluation, and second in the Spanish.
Programming is the activity of modifying a program in order to bring about specific changes in its behaviour. Yet programming language theory almost exclusively focuses on the meaning of programs. We motivate a change-oriented viewpoint from which the meaning of a program change is a change to the programs meaning.
We discuss an algorithm which produces the meaning of a sentence given meanings of its words, and its resemblance to quantum teleportation. In fact, this protocol was the main source of inspiration for this algorithm which has many applications in the area of Natural Language Processing.
Emojis have become ubiquitous in digital communication, due to their visual appeal as well as their ability to vividly convey human emotion, among other factors. The growing prominence of emojis in social media and other instant messaging also leads to an increased need for systems and tools to operate on text containing emojis. In this study, we assess this support by considering test sets of tweets with emojis, based on which we perform a series of experiments investigating the ability of prominent NLP and text processing tools to adequately process them. In particular, we consider tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, as well as sentiment analysis. Our findings show that many tools still have notable shortcomings when operating on text containing emojis.