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Welcome to the website of the project ACCOMOJI: Emoji Accommodation in 🇨🇭 Multilingual Computer-Mediated Conversations!

Among new ways of expression emerging in computer-mediated communication (CMC), emojis have become extremely popular worldwide, particularly in interpersonal conversations. The ACCOMOJI project examines 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. Based on the What’s Up, Switzerland? Corpus of WhatsApp conversations, a citizen science approach will be taken to annotate emojis in terms of function and emotional content. Data science methods will then capture accommodation patterns in the annotated data and correlate them with demographic features. Besides an assessment of the appropriateness of various formal models and methods for addressing emotional aspects of interpersonal CMC, the project will result in a better understanding of citizen science practices and their applicability to language-related research in the Swiss multilingual context.

You can watch our project presentation video here.

The project is funded by the UNIL-EPFL Collaborative Research on Science and Society (CROSS) Programme that supports interdisciplinary projects dealing with current issues in society and technology.

The Survey

The term “citizen science” refers to the practice of involving people that do not have a professional scientific background in the collaborative production of scientific knowledge, on a voluntary basis. In the framework of ACCOMOJI, we adopt this approach to learn more about certain aspects of the content of WhatsApp conversations that cannot be reliably determined by computers and therefore need to be determined by humans, such as the emotional content and role of emojis, as well as the nature of the relationship between conversation participants. As we benefit from the voluntary collaboration of “citizen scientists”, we are committed to giving back to this community by sharing the results of our research in a format and language that is adapted to their non-technical background.

You can be a citizen scientist with us by filling out our survey in German or in French! Need help filling it out, or want to see how it’s done? You can check out our tutorial videos on YouTube in German or in French!

Evaluate emojis and win a prize!

We’re doing a weekly draw for 5 gift cards worth 50 CHF per week! If you would like to be entered into the random draw for a chance to win one, then make sure to enter your e-mail address when you participate in the study! The e-mail address will only be used to contact you if you win a prize, and it will not be associated with your responses. If you are not selected to win a prize, then we will delete your email address from our records.