# Emoji Promotes Developer Participation and Issue Resolution on GitHub

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.16360 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16360/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Causal Inference in Natural Language Processing: Estimation, Prediction, Interpretation and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00725/) (2021)
- [A Computational Approach to Politeness with Application to Social Factors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.6078/) (2013)
- [The State of Applied Econometrics - Causality and Policy Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.00699/) (2016)
- [Spice up Your Chat: The Intentions and Sentiment Effects of Using Emoji](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.02860/) (2017)
- [Bias and high-dimensional adjustment in observational studies of peer effects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04692/) (2017)
- [Mining Valence, Arousal, and Dominance - Possibilities for Detecting Burnout and Productivity?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.04287/) (2016)
- [A First Look at Emoji Usage on GitHub: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04863/) (2018)
- [Emojis predict dropouts of remote workers: An empirical study of emoji usage on GitHub](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05737/) (2021)
- [Black or White but never neutral: How readers perceive identity from yellow or skin-toned emoji](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05887/) (2021)
- [Team Resilience under Shock: An Empirical Analysis of GitHub Repositories during Early COVID-19 Pandemic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12326/) (2023)
- [The Impacts of Sentiments and Tones in Community-Generated Issue Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10615/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Emojis Decoded: Leveraging ChatGPT for Enhanced Understanding in Social Media Communications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01681/) (2024)
- [From Adoption to Adaption: Tracing the Diffusion of New Emojis on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14187/) (2024)
- [Artificial Intelligence in Open Source Software Engineering: A Foundation for Sustainability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07071/) (2026)
- [The Hidden Language of Harm: Examining the Role of Emojis in Harmful Online Communication and Content Moderation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00583/) (2025)
- [Beyond Code Contributions: How Network Position, Temporal Bursts, and Code Review Activities Shape Contributor Influence in Large-Scale Open Source Ecosystems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06426/) (2026)
- [Predicting Open Source Software Sustainability with Deep Temporal Neural Hierarchical Architectures and Explainable AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09064/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Although remote working is increasingly adopted during the pandemic, many are concerned by the low-efficiency in the remote working. Missing in text-based communication are non-verbal cues such as facial expressions and body language, which hinders the effective communication and negatively impacts the work outcomes. Prevalent on social media platforms, emojis, as alternative non-verbal cues, are gaining popularity in the virtual workspaces well. In this paper, we study how emoji usage influences developer participation and issue resolution in virtual workspaces. To this end, we collect GitHub issues for a one-year period and apply causal inference techniques to measure the causal effect of emojis on the outcome of issues, controlling for confounders such as issue content, repository, and author information. We find that emojis can significantly reduce the resolution time of issues and attract more user participation. We also compare the heterogeneous effect on different types of issues. These findings deepen our understanding of the developer communities, and they provide design implications on how to facilitate interactions and broaden developer participation.