# How to Do Things without Words: Modeling Semantic Drift of Emoji

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.04093 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04093/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.4546/) (2013)
- [Word Embeddings Quantify 100 Years of Gender and Ethnic Stereotypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08412/) (2017)
- [Diachronic Word Embeddings Reveal Statistical Laws of Semantic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.09096/) (2016)
- [Using millions of emoji occurrences to learn any-domain representations for detecting sentiment, emotion and sarcasm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00524/) (2017)
- [Statistically Significant Detection of Linguistic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.3315/) (2014)
- [Cultural Shift or Linguistic Drift? Comparing Two Computational Measures of Semantic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02821/) (2016)
- [emoji2vec: Learning Emoji Representations from their Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08359/) (2016)
- [Studying Cultural Differences in Emoji Usage across the East and the West](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02671/) (2019)
- [Through a Gender Lens: Learning Usage Patterns of Emojis from Large-Scale Android Users](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05546/) (2017)
- [Exploring Emoji Usage and Prediction Through a Temporal Variation Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00731/) (2018)
- [Semantic Journeys: Quantifying Change in Emoji Meaning from 2012-2018](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00846/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emoji have become a significant part of our informal textual communication. Previous work addressing the societal and linguistic functions of emoji overlook the evolving meaning of the symbol. This evolution could be addressed through the framework of semantic drifts. In this paper we model and analyze the semantic drift of emoji and discuss the features that may be contributing to the drift, some are unique to emoji and some are more general.