MemeMQA: Multimodal Question Answering for Memes via Rationale-Based Inferencing

Siddhant Agarwal, Shivam Sharma, Preslav Nakov, Tanmoy Chakraborty


Abstract
Memes have evolved as a prevalent medium for diverse communication, ranging from humour to propaganda. With the rising popularity of image-focused content, there is a growing need to explore its potential harm from different aspects. Previous studies have analyzed memes in closed settings - detecting harm, applying semantic labels, and offering natural language explanations. To extend this research, we introduce MemeMQA, a multimodal question-answering framework aiming to solicit accurate responses to structured questions while providing coherent explanations. We curate MemeMQACorpus, a new dataset featuring 1,880 questions related to 1,122 memes with corresponding answer-explanation pairs. We further propose ARSENAL, a novel two-stage multimodal framework that leverages the reasoning capabilities of LLMs to address MemeMQA. We benchmark MemeMQA using competitive baselines and demonstrate its superiority - ~18% enhanced answer prediction accuracy and distinct text generation lead across various metrics measuring lexical and semantic alignment over the best baseline. We analyze ARSENAL’s robustness through diversification of question-set, confounder-based evaluation regarding MemeMQA’s generalizability, and modality-specific assessment, enhancing our understanding of meme interpretation in the multimodal communication landscape.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.300
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5042–5078
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.300
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.300
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Siddhant Agarwal, Shivam Sharma, Preslav Nakov, and Tanmoy Chakraborty. 2024. MemeMQA: Multimodal Question Answering for Memes via Rationale-Based Inferencing. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 5042–5078, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MemeMQA: Multimodal Question Answering for Memes via Rationale-Based Inferencing (Agarwal et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.300.pdf