MetaMeme: A Dataset for Meme Template and Meta-Category Classification

AbstractThis paper introduces a new dataset for classifying memes by their template and communicative intent.It includes a broad selection of meme templates and examples scraped from imgflip and a smaller hand-annotated set of memes scraped from Reddit.The Reddit memes have been annotated for meta-category using a novel annotation scheme that classifies memes by the structure of the perspective they are being used to communicate.YOLOv11 and ChatGPT 4o are used to provide baseline modeling results.We find that YOLO struggles with template classification on real-world data but outperforms ChatGPT in classifying meta-categories.