@inproceedings{zhou-etal-2026-prosody,
    title = "The Prosody of Emojis",
    author = "Zhou, Giulio  and
      Lam, Tsz Kin  and
      Birch, Alexandra  and
      Haddow, Barry",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1459/",
    pages = "31655--31671",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Prosodic features such as pitch, timing, and intonation are central to spoken communication, conveying emotion, intent, and discourse structure. In text-based settings, where these cues are absent, emojis act as visual surrogates that add affective and pragmatic nuance. This study examines how emojis influence prosodic realisation in speech and how listeners interpret prosodic cues to recover emoji meanings. Unlike previous work, we directly link prosody and emojis by analysing human speech data collected through a controlled elicited production task. Using Bayesian multilevel modelling, we show that speakers systematically adapt their prosody based on emoji cues, and that listeners can recover intended meanings significantly above chance. Furthermore, our results reveal a clear hierarchy in prosodic shifts: greater semantic differences between emojis correspond to increased prosodic divergence. These findings suggest that emojis are meaningful carriers of prosodic intent that bridge the gap between digital text and spoken production."
}