A Preliminary Study on Understanding Voice-only Online Meetings Using Emoji-based Captioning for Deaf or Hard of Hearing Users

Abstract

In the midst of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, online meetings are rapidly increasing. Deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) people participating in an online meeting often face difficulties in capturing the affective states of other speakers. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness of emoji-based representation of spoken text to capture such affective states. Nevertheless, in voice-only online meetings, it is still not clear how emoji-based spoken texts can assist DHH people to understand the feelings of speakers without perceiving their facial expressions. We therefore conducted a preliminary experiment to understand the effect of emoji-based text representation during voice-only online meetings by leveraging an emoji-based captioning system. Our preliminary results demonstrate the necessity of designing an advanced system to help DHH people understanding the voice-only online meetings more meaningfully.