Although remote working is increasingly adopted during the pandemic, many are concerned by the low-efficiency in the remote working. Missing in text-based communication are non-verbal cues such as facial expressions and body language, which hinders the effective communication and negatively impacts the work outcomes. Prevalent on social media platforms, emojis, as alternative non-verbal cues, are gaining popularity in the virtual workspaces well. In this paper, we study how emoji usage influences developer participation and issue resolution in virtual workspaces. To this end, we collect GitHub issues for a one-year period and apply causal inference techniques to measure the causal effect of emojis on the outcome of issues, controlling for confounders such as issue content, repository, and author information. We find that emojis can significantly reduce the resolution time of issues and attract more user participation. We also compare the heterogeneous effect on different types of issues. These findings deepen our understanding of the developer communities, and they provide design implications on how to facilitate interactions and broaden developer participation.

翻译：尽管疫情期间远程工作日益普及，但许多人担忧其效率低下。基于文本的沟通中缺乏面部表情和肢体语言等非语言线索，这阻碍了有效沟通并对工作成果产生负面影响。表情符号作为社交媒体平台上流行的替代性非语言线索，在虚拟工作空间中也逐渐普及。本文研究表情符号使用如何影响虚拟工作空间中的开发者参与和问题解决。为此，我们收集了一年的GitHub问题数据，并应用因果推断技术衡量表情符号对问题结果的因果效应，同时控制问题内容、仓库和作者信息等混杂因素。我们发现表情符号能显著缩短问题的解决时间并吸引更多用户参与。我们还比较了不同类型问题上的异质性效应。这些发现加深了我们对开发者社区的理解，并为如何促进互动、拓宽开发者参与提供了设计启示。