MUTE: A Multimodal Dataset for Detecting Hateful Memes

Eftekhar Hossain, Omar Sharif, Mohammed Moshiul Hoque


Abstract
The exponential surge of social media has enabled information propagation at an unprecedented rate. However, it also led to the generation of a vast amount of malign content, such as hateful memes. To eradicate the detrimental impact of this content, over the last few years hateful memes detection problem has grabbed the attention of researchers. However, most past studies were conducted primarily for English memes, while memes on resource constraint languages (i.e., Bengali) are under-studied. Moreover, current research considers memes with a caption written in monolingual (either English or Bengali) form. However, memes might have code-mixed captions (English+Bangla), and the existing models can not provide accurate inference in such cases. Therefore, to facilitate research in this arena, this paper introduces a multimodal hate speech dataset (named MUTE) consisting of 4158 memes having Bengali and code-mixed captions. A detailed annotation guideline is provided to aid the dataset creation in other resource constraint languages. Additionally, extensive experiments have been carried out on MUTE, considering the only visual, only textual, and both modalities. The result demonstrates that joint evaluation of visual and textual features significantly improves (≈ 3%) the hateful memes classification compared to the unimodal evaluation.
Anthology ID:
2022.aacl-srw.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop
Month:
November
Year:
2022
Address:
Online
Editors:
Yan Hanqi, Yang Zonghan, Sebastian Ruder, Wan Xiaojun
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
32–39
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-srw.5
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eftekhar Hossain, Omar Sharif, and Mohammed Moshiul Hoque. 2022. MUTE: A Multimodal Dataset for Detecting Hateful Memes. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Student Research Workshop, pages 32–39, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MUTE: A Multimodal Dataset for Detecting Hateful Memes (Hossain et al., AACL-IJCNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-srw.5.pdf