The ELCo Dataset: Bridging Emoji and Lexical Composition

Zi Yun Yang, Ziqing Zhang, Yisong Miao

Abstract
Can emojis be composed to convey intricate meanings like English phrases? As a pioneering study, we present the Emoji-Lexical Composition (ELCo) dataset, a new resource that offers parallel annotations of emoji sequences corresponding to English phrases. Our dataset contains 1,655 instances, spanning 209 diverse concepts from tangible ones like “right man” (✔️👨) to abstract ones such as “full attention” (🧐✍️, illustrating a metaphoric composition of a focusing face and writing hand). ELCo enables the analysis of the patterns shared between emoji and lexical composition. Through a corpus study, we discovered that simple strategies like direct representation and reduplication are sufficient for conveying certain concepts, but a richer, metaphorical strategy is essential for expressing more abstract ideas. We further introduce an evaluative task, Emoji-based Textual Entailment (EmoTE), to assess the proficiency of NLP models in comprehending emoji compositions. Our findings reveals the challenge of understanding emoji composition in a zero-shot setting for current models, including ChatGPT. Our analysis indicates that the intricacy of metaphorical compositions contributes to this challenge. Encouragingly, models show marked improvement when fine-tuned on the ELCo dataset, with larger models excelling in deciphering nuanced metaphorical compositions.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1381
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
15899–15909
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1381
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zi Yun Yang, Ziqing Zhang, and Yisong Miao. 2024. The ELCo Dataset: Bridging Emoji and Lexical Composition. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 15899–15909, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
The ELCo Dataset: Bridging Emoji and Lexical Composition (Yang et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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