@inproceedings{hakami-etal-2021-arabic,
    title = "{A}rabic Emoji Sentiment Lexicon ({A}rab-{ESL}): A Comparison between {A}rabic and {E}uropean Emoji Sentiment Lexicons",
    author = "Hakami, Shatha Ali A.  and
      Hendley, Robert  and
      Smith, Phillip",
    editor = "Habash, Nizar  and
      Bouamor, Houda  and
      Hajj, Hazem  and
      Magdy, Walid  and
      Zaghouani, Wajdi  and
      Bougares, Fethi  and
      Tomeh, Nadi  and
      Abu Farha, Ibrahim  and
      Touileb, Samia",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop",
    month = apr,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Kyiv, Ukraine (Virtual)",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2021.wanlp-1.7/",
    pages = "60--71",
    abstract = "Emoji (the popular digital pictograms) are sometimes seen as a new kind of artificial and universally usable and consistent writing code. In spite of their assumed universality, there is some evidence that the sense of an emoji, specifically in regard to sentiment, may change from language to language and culture to culture. This paper investigates whether contextual emoji sentiment analysis is consistent across Arabic and European languages. To conduct this investigation, we, first, created the Arabic emoji sentiment lexicon (Arab-ESL). Then, we exploited an existing European emoji sentiment lexicon to compare the sentiment conveyed in each of the two families of language and culture (Arabic and European). The results show that the pairwise correlation between the two lexicons is consistent for emoji that represent, for instance, hearts, facial expressions, and body language. However, for a subset of emoji (those that represent objects, nature, symbols, and some human activities), there are large differences in the sentiment conveyed. More interestingly, an extremely high level of inconsistency has been shown with food emoji."
}