Emoji can be valuable features in textual sentiment analysis. One of the key elements of the use of emoji in sentiment analysis is the emoji sentiment lexicon. However, constructing such a lexicon is a challenging task. This is because interpreting the sentiment conveyed by these pictographic symbols is highly subjective, and differs depending upon how each person perceives them. Cultural background is considered to be one of the main factors that affects emoji sentiment interpretation. Thus, we focus in this work on targeting people from Arab cultures. This is done by constructing a context-free Arabic emoji sentiment lexicon annotated by native Arabic speakers from seven different regions (Gulf, Egypt, Levant, Sudan, North Africa, Iraq, and Yemen) to see how these Arabic users label the sentiment of these symbols without a textual context. We recruited 53 annotators (males and females) to annotate 1,069 unique emoji. Then we evaluated the reliability of the annotation for each participant by applying sensitivity (Recall) and consistency (Krippendorff’s Alpha) tests. For the analysis, we investigated the resulting emoji sentiment annotations to explore the impact of the Arabic cultural context. We analyzed this cultural reflection from different perspectives, including national affiliation, use of colour indications, animal indications, weather indications and religious impact.

Emoji (digital pictograms) are crucial features for textual sentiment analysis. However, analysing the sentiment roles of emoji is very complex. This is due to its dependency on different factors, such as textual context, cultural perspective, interlocutor’s personal traits, interlocutors’ relationships or a platforms’ functional features. This work introduces an approach to analysing the sentiment effects of emoji as textual features. Using an Arabic dataset as a benchmark, our results confirm the borrowed argument that each emoji has three different norms of sentiment role (negative, neutral or positive). Therefore, an emoji can play different sentiment roles depending upon the context. It can behave as an emphasizer, an indicator, a mitigator, a reverser or a trigger of either negative or positive sentiment within a text. In addition, an emoji may have a neutral effect (i.e., no effect) on the sentiment of the text.

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.