Emojis in human-machine interactions

Emojis, graphical representations of emotions and entities, represent a salient feature of digital discourse. Nonetheless, they still have not been thoroughly investigated in the emerging field of chatbot interactions. With the present study, we address this gap in the literature and conduct a fine-grained, data-based analysis of emoji use in the first turn generated by 237 chatbots operating in the customer service domain. Our focus encompasses the emoji selection and their position. Emojis’ functions will be briefly addressed as well. Despite the limited dataset, this study offers an innovative examination of emoji use in chatbots operating in English, German, Italian and French, and provides valuable linguistic insights into human-chatbot interactions for both theoretical and practical applications.