MemeWeaver: Inter-Meme Graph Reasoning for Sexism and Misogyny Detection

Paolo Italiani, David Gimeno-Gómez, Luca Ragazzi, Gianluca Moro, Paolo Rosso


Abstract
Women are twice as likely as men to face online harassment due to their gender. Despite recent advances in multimodal content moderation, most approaches still overlook the social dynamics behind this phenomenon, where perpetrators reinforce prejudices and group identity within like-minded communities. Graph-based methods offer a promising way to capture such interactions, yet existing solutions remain limited by heuristic graph construction, shallow modality fusion, and instance-level reasoning. In this work, we present MemeWeaver, an end-to-end trainable multimodal framework for detecting sexism and misogyny through a novel inter-meme graph reasoning mechanism. We systematically evaluate multiple visual-textual fusion strategies and show that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on the MAMI and EXIST benchmarks, while achieving faster training convergence. Further analyses reveal that the learned graph structure captures semantically meaningful patterns, offering valuable insights into the relational nature of online hate.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-eacl.111
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2120–2134
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.findings-eacl.111/
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Cite (ACL):
Paolo Italiani, David Gimeno-Gómez, Luca Ragazzi, Gianluca Moro, and Paolo Rosso. 2026. MemeWeaver: Inter-Meme Graph Reasoning for Sexism and Misogyny Detection. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026, pages 2120–2134, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MemeWeaver: Inter-Meme Graph Reasoning for Sexism and Misogyny Detection (Italiani et al., Findings 2026)
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