Research on Emoticons: Re view of the Field and Proposal of Research Framework

Emoticons are string of symbols representing body language in text-based communication. In Natural Language Processing (NLP) emoticons have been considered as unnatural language entities. We argue that, in over 40-yearlong history of text based communication, emoticons have gained a status of an indispensable means of support for text based messages. This makes them fully a part of Natural rather than Unnatural Language Processing (UNLP). We argue further that the reason the emoticons have been considered as a part of UNLP lies in the lack of sufficient methods for the analysis of emoticons. We propose including emoticon processing in a set of frequent language processing challenges. We mention our state of the art system for extraction and analysis of Japanese emoticons.

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