Researchers Gather for the International Workshop on Emoji Understanding

Two years ago, Sanjaya Wijeratne--a computer science PhD student at Wright State University--noticed something odd in his research. He was studying the communication of gang members on Twitter. Among the grandstanding about drugs and money, he found gang members repeatedly dropping the emoji in their tweets. Wijeratne had been working on separate research relating to word-sense disambiguation, a field of computational linguistics that looks at how words take on multiple meanings. The use of jumped out as a brand new problem.