*******************************************************************************************************

Emoji2021 - 4th​ International Workshop on Emoji Understanding and Applications in Social Media
Co-located with The 15th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM-21)

Call for Papers - http://emoji2021.aiisc.ai/#section-cfp
Paper Submission Deadline - 27th March, 2021
Author Guidelines and Templates - http://emoji2021.aiisc.ai/#section-submission
Paper Submission Website - https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=emoji2021
Funding - Available for selected student authors who are presenting a paper at the workshop.

*******************************************************************************************************

***************************************
Call for Papers
***************************************

With the rise of social media, emoji have become an extremely popular form of communication in social media. They are equally popular across major social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. In 2018, Facebook reported that over 700 million messages with emoji are shared on their platform every day while over 900 million emoji are sent in Facebook Messenger without any text content every day. In the same year, Twitter reported that it processed 250 million emoji per month. In 2015, Instagram reported that nearly half of the photo comments posted on Instagram contain emoji and Instagram users tend to replace slang terms using emoji in photo comments. Another study revealed that emoji are slowly taking over emoticons on Twitter. Emoji data generated on social media sites have been utilized to study how emoji are used across different languages, cultures, user communities and as features to learn machine learning models to solve problems that span across many applications, including sentiment analysis, emotion analysis, and sarcasm detection. The ability to automatically process, derive meaning, and interpret text fused with emoji will be essential as society embraces emoji as a standard form of online communication. Thus, Emoji2021 brings together computer and social science researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry to discuss and exchange ideas on understanding social, cultural, communicative, and linguistic roles of emoji while leading the discussions on building novel computational methods to understand and interpret them.

Emoji2021 is focused on research and discussions on challenges in emoji understanding, including but not limited to the following research directions.

Challenges in interpreting the meaning of an emoji in a message context
Novel methods for emoji sense disambiguation
Novel methods for calculating emoji similarity
Novel methods for emoji prediction
Emoji-based retrieval and search
Challenges in using emoji as a language
Emoji’s effects on the evolution of language constructs used on social media such as emoticons and slang terms
Common emoji usages in social media
Cultural and community-specific emoji meaning evolution and interpretation
Distinct social and communicative roles of emoji
Understanding sender intention and receiver interpretation of emoji
Emoji rendering and interface design challenges
Applications of emoji in social media
Emoji and the Law
Emoji, gender, and identity
Research related to other pictorial representations such as emoticons, stickers, kaomoji, emotes, customized emoji (e.g., bitmoji), and animated gifs

We encourage submissions (full research papers upto 10 pages, short papers upto 4 pages, and demo proposals upto 2 pages) that utilize quantitative, qualitative and mixed research methods to approach the above challenges as contributions.

***************************************
Submission Guidelines
***************************************

We invite regular technical papers (8 pages), short papers (4 pages), and demo proposals (2 page). Submissions must be original and should not have been published previously or be under consideration for publication while being evaluated for this workshop. Submissions will be evaluated by the program committee based on the quality of the work and its fit to the workshop themes. All submissions should be double-blind and use the AAAI two-column template which can be dwnloaded from here - https://www.aaai.org/Publications/Templates/AuthorKit21.zip. A high-resolution PDF of the paper should be uploaded to the EasyChair submission site at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=emoji2021 before the paper submission deadline. The PDF file must have all non-standard fonts embedded. The proceedings will be published in ICWSM Workshop Proceedings.

***************************************
Important Dates
***************************************

Paper Submission: March 27th, 2021 (23:59, anywhere on earth).
Author Notification: April 10th, 2021.
Camera-ready Paper Due: April 17th, 2021.
Workshop Day: June 7th 2021, Full-day. Workshop will be held online.

***************************************
Workshop Organizing Committee
***************************************

Sanjaya Wijeratne - Holler Technologies, Inc., San Mateo, California, USA.
Jennifer 8. Lee - Emojination, USA.
Horacio Saggion - Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain.
Amit Sheth - Artificial Intelligence Institute, University of South Carolina, USA.

***************************************
Contact
***************************************

Sanjaya Wijeratne - sanjaya@holler.io | Jennifer. 8. Lee - jenny@emojination.org | Horacio Saggion - horacio.saggion@upf.edu | Amit Sheth - amit@sc.edu