Why is 😂 more popular than 😃 ? Why is a person more likely to use 👍 or 😘 to express appreciation ? These represent the types of questions School of Information doctoral student Wei Ai and his colleagues answered when they examined the use of emojis by one million users through more than 1.2 billion messages. The researchers analyzed the relationship of the symbols to words, to measure emoji semantics and to figure out what makes some symbols more popular than others. More than 9 percent of the messages the team analyzed contained at least one emoji. “The popularity of emojis is linked to their semantic meanings,” said Ai, a graduate student research assistant with the Foreseer Group, a U-M research team that conducts cutting-edge research related to data mining, machine learning, and information retrieval.
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