Beyond a Single Sentiment Score: Topical and Affective Dimensions of Emoji Meaning on Twitter

Rohan James, Ioannis Christofilogiannis, Yuuv Jauhari, Shreya Shah, Gauri Pethkar · 2026 · arXiv

DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2610.28337 · open-access PDF

Abstract

Emoji are widely treated as compact affective tokens whose meaning is summarised by a single sentiment score. We argue that this picture is incomplete. From a corpus of 16{,}575 English tweets and a per-emoji metric we call \emph{stability delta} (within-class minus between-class cosine similarity of sentence embeddings), we show that emojis used in tightly clustered topical contexts also exhibit \emph{more} polarised crowd-sourced sentiment, not less. Validated against the Kralj Novak et al.\ (2015) sentiment lexicon, the central correlation is Spearman $ρ= +0.361$ (Holm $p = 0.015$, 95\% boo

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