What is it about?
This paper shows how emojis, symbols, and look-alike letters can confuse corpus tools, changing word counts and research results. It explains why this happens and how to prepare digital texts so that software analyses what people actually wrote, rather than a distorted version of the data.
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Why is it important?
Digital communication now depends on emojis, stylised characters, platform-specific text, and AI-readable data. This paper is timely because these small details can affect not only corpus linguistics, but also digital discourse research, social media analysis, and AI systems trained or tested on online language. It shows that reliable research starts with faithful data: if software misreads the text, the results may look scientific while resting on unstable evidence.
Perspectives
This paper came from a simple but uncomfortable observation: what researchers see on screen is not always what their software counts. I wanted to make that hidden layer of digital text visible. For me, emojis and homoglyphs are not technical noise; they are part of how people write online. Treating them carefully means taking digital language seriously, before interpretation begins.
Matteo Di Cristofaro
Universita degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Data interference, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, June 2026, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/ijcl.24116.dic.
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