Does Machine "know" interpersonal pragmatics? Evidence from MARBERT's learning of emoji pragmatics in Arabic digital discourse

Abstract

This study examines Transformer-based models' ability to learn emoji pragmatics in Arabic digital discourse (ADD), providing evidence from MARBERT's behavior with interpersonal pragmatic functions (IPFs). A corpus of 8,504 unique emoji-posts collected from Facebook via Python was used in the study. These posts were manually annotated, developed, and labeled for five IPFs: Politeness, Respect, Solidarity, Empathy, and Encouragement. A mixed-method approach was employed comprising statistical methods and interpretative analyses involving speech act theory, politeness theory, and rapport management theory. MARBERT was fine-tuned to model these context-dependent pragmatic functions. Findings demonstrate MARBERT's ability to learn these IPFs, achieving strong performance on unseen data, with an accuracy of 93%, a micro F1-score of 0.61, and a macro F1-score of 0.56, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing interpersonal functions beyond conventional sentiment analysis. Function-level evaluation showed that Politeness and Respect were identified more accurately than Solidarity, reflecting differences in the explicitness and contextual dependence of IPFs. The study concludes that Transformer-based models learn patterns of face management and relational communication but remain challenged by highly implicit social meanings. It contributes a novel computational approach to modeling emoji pragmatics and advances the integration of interpersonal pragmatics with NLP for digital communication research.