A Template Is All You Meme
Bates, Luke Christensen, Peter Ebert Nakov, Preslav Gurevych, Iryna
Bates, Luke
Christensen, Peter Ebert
Nakov, Preslav
Gurevych, Iryna
Supervisor
Department
Natural Language Processing
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Type
Conference proceeding
Date
2025
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Language
English
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Abstract
Templatic memes, characterized by a semantic structure adaptable to the creator's intent, represent a significant yet underexplored area within meme processing literature. With the goal of establishing a new direction for computational meme analysis, here we create a knowledge base composed of more than 5,200 meme templates, information about them, and 54,000 examples of template instances (templatic memes). To investigate the semantic signal of meme templates, we show that we can match memes in datasets to base templates contained in our knowledge base with a distance-based lookup. To demonstrate the power of meme templates, we create TSplit, a method to reorganize datasets, where a template or templatic instance can only appear in either the training or test split. Our re-split datasets enhance general meme knowledge and improve sample efficiency, leading to more robust models. Our examination of meme templates results in state-of-the-art performance for every dataset we consider, paving the way for analysis grounded in templateness.(1)
Citation
L. Bates, P. E. Christensen, P. Nakov, and I. Gurevych, “A Template Is All You Meme,” vol. 1, pp. 10443–10475, Jun. 2025, doi: 10.18653/V1/2025.NAACL-LONG.525.
Source
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Conference
2025 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics-NAACL
Keywords
Meme Templates, TSplit, Dataset Re-splitting, Sample Efficiency, Robust Meme Models, Semantic Meme Analysis, Knowledge Base, Template-Aware Learning
Subjects
Source
2025 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics-NAACL
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics