Reza Kazemian
Abstract
The use of emoji / emoticon is increasingly popular across the world in different platforms of online communication and they are commonly used in modern text communication as well. According to analyzed data, Iranian internet users would rather use emoji than emoticon due to some reasons, namely, expressive, ...
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The use of emoji / emoticon is increasingly popular across the world in different platforms of online communication and they are commonly used in modern text communication as well. According to analyzed data, Iranian internet users would rather use emoji than emoticon due to some reasons, namely, expressive, practical and aesthetic reasons. This study is set forth to explore whether the use of emoji bears any relationship to the gender and age among Iranian internet users. The result of statistical analysis has patently revealed that women tend to use emoji (both positive and negative) more than men; correspondingly, they are considered more emotional with respect to sentiment analysis. Moreover, the result has demonstrated that women openly express their emotions and love with emoji in social media similar to real life. Concerning age, collected data display that there is an inverse relationship between the age and the frequency of emoji use. In other words, the frequency of the emoji use would be substantially declined by growing older. This study can provide a base for future research most notably those pertaining to machine learning, natural language processing and designing models for predicting online demographical information.