Deciphering emoji variation in courts: a social semiotic perspective

Abstract

Emojis are increasingly being used as digital evidence in courts due to the miscommunication and misinterpretation arising from the high variability of their usage and interpretation. Emojis in courts have been extensively researched in extant studies, but relatively little attention has been paid to the emoji variation phenomena in Chinese courts. Through an empirical qualitative content analysis of the court judgments in China and the United States and some supplementary materials, this study posits that an emoji’s meaning in courts can be subject to the following six categories of variations: i. variation across platforms, including devices, operating systems, software programs and clients; ii. temporal variation; iii. variation in court cases under different rules of evidence; iv. variation in individual participants; v. variation across social groups; and vi. linguistic-cultural variation. From a social semiotic perspective, emojis as dynamic signs have great meaning potentials, making their meanings context-dependent and interpreter-dependent. For this reason, it is suggested that legal professionals untangle and weave historical, social, cultural and legal contexts into the interpretation of an emoji’s meaning. Moreover, a probe into the contextualized configuration of emojis can offer practical insights into the interpretation of emoji-bearing texts in judicial decision-making as well as the admissibility and investigation of digital evidence in courts.

The puzzle of ideography

“…Morin asserts that emojis are not yet ready to qualify as ideographic writing because, as the standardization account would predict, there is a lack of agreement over the meaning of emojis. The interpretation of isolated emojis tends to vary over participants, social groups, language/cultural as well as time and platform (Pei & Cheng, 2022). Thus, the author's cursory treatment of the category of face emojis seems to support his claim that meaning standardization for emojis, as for ideographic writing systems in general, poses an insurmountable challenge.…”

“…Even more controversial is the author's focus on symbols in isolation when searching for standardization of meaning. When interpreting emojis, analyses often consider not only lexical but also interpersonal, social, cultural as well as legal and other technical conditions of usage (Pei & Cheng, 2022). The implication is that single-facial emojis, despite their typically high-token frequency, are not the most representative symbols on which to base an argument about the expressive power and communicative potential of all emojis and, thus, their potential as ideographic symbols.…”

An Empirical Analysis Towards Replacing Vocabulary-Rigid Embeddings by a Vocabulary-Free Mechanism

“…However, recent research has highlighted the limitations of subword-level tokenization, including poor generaliza- tion for out-of-vocabulary words and domains due to their reliance on a fixed vocabulary (Bostrom & Durrett, 2020;Klein & Tsarfaty, 2020;Hofmann et al, 2021;Dong et al, 2020;Xu et al, 2021). This limitation is particularly problematic for forensic NLP models used to detect covert criminal communications (CCC) that employ unusual characters and subwords for obfuscation (Bromberg et al, 2020;Pei & Cheng, 2022;Tong et al, 2017;Wagner et al, 2020;Wang et al, 2019;Zhu et al, 2019).…”

Emoji use validates the potential for meaning standardization among ideographic symbols

“…Morin asserts that emojis are not yet ready to qualify as ideographic writing because, as the standardization account would predict, there is a lack of agreement over the meaning of emojis. The interpretation of isolated emojis tends to vary over participants, social groups, language/cultural as well as time and platform (Pei & Cheng, 2022). Thus, the author's cursory treatment of the category of face emojis seems to support his claim that meaning standardization for emojis, as for ideographic writing systems in general, poses an insurmountable challenge.…”

“…Even more controversial is the author's focus on symbols in isolation when searching for standardization of meaning. When interpreting emojis, analyses often consider not only lexical but also interpersonal, social, cultural as well as legal and other technical conditions of usage (Pei & Cheng, 2022). The implication is that single-facial emojis, despite their typically high-token frequency, are not the most representative symbols on which to base an argument about the expressive power and communicative potential of all emojis and, thus, their potential as ideographic symbols.…”