FigSIM: A Dataset for Fine-grained Suicide Severity and Figurative Language in Suicide Memes

Liuliu Chen, Elise Carrotte, Brian E. Chapman, Jo Robinson, Mike Conway


Abstract
Suicide memes are memes used to express suicide-related thoughts or comment on suicide-related issues. Suicide memes are increasingly common on social media, yet remain poorly understood and potentially harmful. There is an urgent need to better understand their characteristics and to develop appropriate content moderation strategies that limits users’ exposure to potentially harmful content. Currently, the absence of annotated datasets of suicide memes remains a key barrier to developing and evaluating automated moderation approaches. In this paper, we introduce FigSIM, the first dataset designed for fine-grained analysis of suicide memes. The dataset consists of 1049 memes, each annotated for (1) fine-grained suicide severity levels, (2) figurative phenomena (e.g. metaphors), and (3) suicide-related content (e.g. suicide method depiction). We benchmark 16 unimodal and multimodal models across three tasks: figurative language, suicide severity, and suicide-related content detection. Overall, FigSIM demonstrates that suicide memes pose unique challenges for both modeling and content moderation. Analysis revealed biases, such as underprediction of higher suicide severity levels, especially for figurative memes.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.1827
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
36659–36675
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1827/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Liuliu Chen, Elise Carrotte, Brian E. Chapman, Jo Robinson, and Mike Conway. 2026. FigSIM: A Dataset for Fine-grained Suicide Severity and Figurative Language in Suicide Memes. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 36659–36675, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FigSIM: A Dataset for Fine-grained Suicide Severity and Figurative Language in Suicide Memes (Chen et al., Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1827.pdf
Checklist:
 2026.findings-acl.1827.checklist.pdf