Syntax in Emoji Sequences on Social Media Posts

With the standardization of emojis, by the Unicode consortium, their use was quickly adopted in publications on social networks. Since then, several studies have been carried out on the functions of emojis in digital communication. Emojis were assigned meanings of emotion, sentiment, semantics, digital gestures, and syntax. We sought to understand the points of view of authors who defend the existence of emoji grammar or emoji syntax and those who, on the contrary, defend that emojis have a function of digital gestures. The research for this review was conducted using the PRISMA model. In this study, we tried to understand whether social media users have a syntactic concern when using emoji sequences. We only considered studies that work with messages published on social networks, or equivalent data, such as messages exchanged via computer or mobile applications. The literature on the use of emoji sequences on social media distinguishes the use of repeated emojis from the use of non-repeating emojis. In the latter, it is possible to find sequences with syntax features. Although these studies used small corpus sizes, we concluded that some users show syntactic concerns when using emoji sequences. The authors propose to use Emoji Semantic Extractor combined with EmojiNet to search for the existence of syntactic sequences of emojis in large blocks of messages.