Apoorv Verma


2024

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Meme-ingful Analysis: Enhanced Understanding of Cyberbullying in Memes Through Multimodal Explanations
Prince Jha | Krishanu Maity | Raghav Jain | Apoorv Verma | Sriparna Saha | Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Internet memes have gained significant influence in communicating political, psychological, and sociocultural ideas. While meme are often humorous, there has been a rise in the use of memes for trolling and cyberbullying. Although a wide variety of effective deep learning-based models have been developed for detecting offensive multimodal memes, only a few works have been done on explainability aspect. Recent laws like “right to explanations” of General Data Protection Regulation, have spurred research in developing interpretable models rather than only focusing on performance. Motivated by this, we introduce MultiBully-Ex, the first benchmark dataset for multimodal explanation from code-mixed cyberbullying memes. Here, both visual and textual modalities are highlighted to explain why a given meme is cyberbullying. A Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) projection based multimodal shared-private multitask approach has been proposed for visual and textual explanation of a meme. Experimental results demonstrate that training with multimodal explanations improves performance in generating textual justifications and more accurately identifying the visual evidence supporting a decision with reliable performance improvements.