Overview of the Multimodal Homophobia and Transphobia Meme Classification Shared Task

Kishore Kumar Ponnusamy, Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan, Premjith B, Thenmozhi Durairaj, Ruba Priyadharshini, Subalalitha Chinnaudayar Navaneethakrishnan


Abstract
This paper presents an overview of the Shared Task on detecting homophobia and transphobia in meme datasets across three languages: Hindi, English, and Chinese. With the rapid growth of internet users worldwide, memes have become a widely used medium for expressing humor, satire, and sarcasm on social media platforms. However, their increasing popularity has also facilitated the spread of hate, misinformation, and propaganda targeting specific communities. Hateful memes often attack individuals or groups based on attributes such as physical appearance, language, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. Among those affected, the LGBTQ+ community is particularly vulnerable and frequently targeted on social media platforms. To address this issue, we organized a shared task that focuses on identifying homophobic and transphobic hate in memes. The task aims to encourage the development of automated systems capable of detecting such harmful content across multiple languages. Evaluation was conducted using Macro F1-score as the primary metric. The top performing system achieved a Macro F1-score of 0.8377 for English, 0.8081 for Hindi, and 0.7535 for Chinese, demonstrating promising results for multilingual hate detection in memes.
Anthology ID:
2026.ltedi-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
Virtual (Online)
Editors:
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Bharathi B, Paul Buitelaar, Durairaj Thenmozhi, Miguel Ángel García Cumbreras, Salud María Jiménez Zafra
Venues:
LTEDI | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
141–149
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.ltedi-1.13/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kishore Kumar Ponnusamy, Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi, Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan, Premjith B, Thenmozhi Durairaj, Ruba Priyadharshini, and Subalalitha Chinnaudayar Navaneethakrishnan. 2026. Overview of the Multimodal Homophobia and Transphobia Meme Classification Shared Task. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion, pages 141–149, Virtual (Online). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Overview of the Multimodal Homophobia and Transphobia Meme Classification Shared Task (Ponnusamy et al., LTEDI 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.ltedi-1.13.pdf