MetaMeme: A Dataset for Meme Template and Meta-Category Classification

Benjamin Lambright, Jordan Youner, Constantine Lignos


Abstract
This paper introduces a new dataset for classifying memes by their template and communicative intent.It includes a broad selection of meme templates and examples scraped from imgflip and a smaller hand-annotated set of memes scraped from Reddit.The Reddit memes have been annotated for meta-category using a novel annotation scheme that classifies memes by the structure of the perspective they are being used to communicate.YOLOv11 and ChatGPT 4o are used to provide baseline modeling results.We find that YOLO struggles with template classification on real-world data but outperforms ChatGPT in classifying meta-categories.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-srw.35
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, USA
Editors:
Abteen Ebrahimi, Samar Haider, Emmy Liu, Sammar Haider, Maria Leonor Pacheco, Shira Wein
Venues:
NAACL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
356–367
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.naacl-srw.35/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Benjamin Lambright, Jordan Youner, and Constantine Lignos. 2025. MetaMeme: A Dataset for Meme Template and Meta-Category Classification. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 356–367, Albuquerque, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MetaMeme: A Dataset for Meme Template and Meta-Category Classification (Lambright et al., NAACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.naacl-srw.35.pdf