BanglaAbuseMeme: A Dataset for Bengali Abusive Meme Classification
Mithun Das Animesh Mukherjee
The dramatic increase in the use of social media platforms for information
sharing has also fueled a steep growth in online abuse. A simple yet effective
way of abusing individuals or communities is by creating memes, which often
integrate an image with a short piece of text layered on top of it. Such
harmful elements are in rampant use and are a threat to online safety. Hence it
is necessary to develop efficient models to detect and flag abusive memes. The
problem becomes more challenging in a low-resource setting (e.g., Bengali
memes, i.e., images with Bengali text embedded on it) because of the absence of
benchmark datasets on which AI models could be trained. In this paper we bridge
this gap by building a Bengali meme dataset. To setup an effective benchmark we
implement several baseline models for classifying abusive memes using this
dataset. We observe that multimodal models that use both textual and visual
information outperform unimodal models. Our best-performing model achieves a
macro F1 score of 70.51. Finally, we perform a qualitative error analysis of
the misclassified memes of the best-performing text-based, image-based and
multimodal models.