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Complex and Ambiguous: Understanding Sticker Misinterpretations in Instant Messaging

Published: 01 November 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Stickers, though similar in appearance to emoji, have distinct characteristics because they often contain animation, diverse gestures, and multiple characters and objects. Stickers can convey richer meaning than emoji, but their complexity and placement constraint may result in miscommunication. In this paper, we aim to understand how people perceive emotion in stickers, as well as how miscommunication related to sticker occurs in actual chat contexts. Toward this goal, we conducted an online survey (n = 87) and in-depth interviews (n = 28) in South Korea. We found emotional and contextual aspects of sticker misinterpretation. In particular, emotion misinterpretation mostly happened due to stickers' ambiguous (multiple) facial/bodily expressions and different perception of dynamism in gestures. In real chat settings, there were also contextual misinterpretations where senders and receivers differently interpret stickers' visual representation/reference, or/and corresponding textual messages. Based on these findings, we provide several practical design implications such as context awareness support in sticker interaction.

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Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 2, Issue CSCW
November 2018
4104 pages
EISSN:2573-0142
DOI:10.1145/3290265
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 November 2018
Published in PACMHCI Volume 2, Issue CSCW

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Author Tags

  1. emoji
  2. instant messaging
  3. message interpretation
  4. sticker

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  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) grant funded by the Korean government
  • Institute for Information communications Technology Promotion (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT)

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  • (2024)TGCA-PVT: Topic-Guided Context-Aware Pyramid Vision Transformer for Sticker Emotion RecognitionProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia10.1145/3664647.3680781(9709-9718)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2024
  • (2024)Exploring Students’ Written Discourse in Resumes: Unveiling Insights for Enhancing Social IntelligenceSHS Web of Conferences10.1051/shsconf/202418204007182(04007)Online publication date: 6-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Unfreezing the Freelancers: Investigating the Strategy of Digital Platform-Based Instant Messaging Communication in Increasing Freelancers’ Response in Gig EconomyInformation Systems Frontiers10.1007/s10796-024-10560-4Online publication date: 12-Dec-2024
  • (2024)Emoji Interpretation and Usage in Bilingual CommunicationHCI International 2024 Posters10.1007/978-3-031-61966-3_18(157-167)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2024
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  • (2023)Affective Profile Pictures: Exploring the Effects of Changing Facial Expressions in Profile Pictures on Text-Based CommunicationProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581061(1-17)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
  • (2023)Analysis of the Use of E-Stickers in Chat Conversations for Higher Education Students2023 International Conference on Information Management and Technology (ICIMTech)10.1109/ICIMTech59029.2023.10277862(413-417)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2023
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  • (2022)Interpretation of Emoji-Only Messages by Message Producers and ReceiversInternational Journal of Technology and Human Interaction10.4018/IJTHI.29906718:1(1-17)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2022
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