ACCOMOJI: Emoji Accommodation in Swiss Multilingual Computer-Mediated Conversations is a collaboration between researchers from University of Lausanne (UNIL) and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) at the intersection of data science and linguistics. It was funded by the UNIL-EPFL Collaborative Research on Science and Society (CROSS) 2021, a programme that supports interdisciplinary projects dealing with current issues in society and technology. ACCOMOJI seeks to examine the ways in which people conversing in the Swiss national languages converge or diverge over time with regard to emoji usage, thereby managing social and emotional distance. We limited ourselves to studying Swiss German and French.
The primary source of data is a corpus of Swiss WhatsApp conversations: "What's up Switzerland?" (WUS, cf. https://www.whatsup-switzerland.ch/index.php/en/). The released data contains function- and emotion-based annotations obtained via a Citizen Science campaign for a number of emojis in the context of the chat where they occurred, as well as demographic information about the citizen science annotators.
