Choosing the right emoji to visually complement or condense the meaning of a message has become part of our daily life. Emojis are pictures, which are naturally combined with plain text, thus creating a new form of language. These pictures are the same independently of where we live, but they can be interpreted and used in different ways. In this paper we compare the meaning and the usage of emojis across different languages. Our results suggest that the overall semantics of the subset of the emojis we studied is preserved across all the languages we analysed. However, some emojis are interpreted in a different way from language to language, and this could be related to socio-geographical differences.

In the paper we compare the four vecotors spaces more formally, but even just looking at the t-SNEs we can see interesting patterns. For example, it seems that Twitter users from UK associate the emoji with beaches and weather (like , , and ), while other (mediterranean) contries like Spain and Italy don't. Also the emoji is used differetly by UK users, as it's similar to Christmas emojis, while in the other languages is just another tree (clusterized close to the vegetation like emojis). There are many emojis that are used differently like and you can spot the differences in the graphs!
However, it seems that the semantics of the emojis is similar, and that most of the emojis are used in the same way over the four languages, like and , but also and !

		
@inproceedings{barbieri2016cosmopolitan,
  title={How Cosmopolitan Are Emojis?: Exploring Emojis Usage and Meaning over Different Languages with Distributional Semantics},
  author={Barbieri, Francesco and Kruszewski, German and Ronzano, Francesco and Saggion, Horacio},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Multimedia Conference},
  pages={531--535},
  year={2016},
  organization={ACM}
}