Emojis and emoticons serve as non-verbal cues and are increasingly prevalent across various platforms, including Modern Code Review. These cues often carry emotive or instructive weight for developers. Our study dives into the utility of Code Review comments (CR comments) by scrutinizing the sentiments and semantics conveyed by emojis within these comments. To assess the usefulness of CR comments, we augment traditional 'textual' features and pre-trained embeddings with 'emoji-specific' features and pre-trained embeddings. To fortify our inquiry, we expand an existing dataset with emoji annotations, guided by existing research on GitHub emoji usage, and re-evaluate the CR comments accordingly. Our models, which incorporate textual and emoji-based sentiment features and semantic understandings of emojis, substantially outperform baseline metrics. The often-overlooked emoji elements in CR comments emerge as key indicators of usefulness, suggesting that these symbols carry significant weight.

翻译：表情符号和情感符号作为非语言线索，在包括现代代码审查在内的多种平台上日益普及。这些线索通常承载着对开发者的情感或指导性意义。我们的研究通过审视代码审查评论（CR评论）中表情符号所传达的情感和语义，深入探讨了这些评论的效用。为评估CR评论的有用性，我们以“文本”特征和预训练嵌入为基础，补充了“表情符号特定”特征和预训练嵌入。为加强研究，我们基于现有关于GitHub表情符号使用的研究，扩展了已有数据集的注释，并据此重新评估了CR评论。我们的模型融合了文本和基于表情符号的情感特征以及对表情符号的语义理解，显著超越了基线指标。CR评论中常被忽视的表情符号元素成为有用性的关键指标，表明这些符号承载着重要分量。