Crowdsourced Explanations for Humorous Internet Memes Based on Linguistic Theories

Abstract

Humorous images can be seen in many social media websites. However, newcomers to these websites often have trouble fitting in because the community subculture is usually implicit. Among all the types of humorous images, Internet memes are relatively hard for newcomers to understand. In this work, we develop a system that leverages crowdsourcing techniques to generate explanations for memes. We claim that people who are not familiar with Internet meme subculture can still quickly pick up the gist of the memes by reading the explanations. Our template-based explanations illustrate the incongruity between normal situations and the punchlines in jokes. The explanations can be produced by completing the two proposed human task processes. Experimental results suggest that the explanations produced by our system greatly help newcomers to understand unfamiliar memes. For further research, it is possible to employ our explanation generation system to improve computational humanities.

AGQA: A Benchmark for Compositional Spatio-Temporal Reasoning

“…Prior work finds that on creative tasks, workflows can help achieve higher quality [7,68,69,85,108,117,148,150] and less constrained outputs [37,53,85,95,117,135]. Workflows may enable novice crowdworkers [120] or users [8,29,66,90,133,135,143] to perform a creative task with an otherwise high barrier of entry. Important qualities for creative tasks include coherence [68,148,150] and aligning to the user's creative vision [124].…”

“…The expense of a workflow refers to paying crowdworkers or paying for an API call to an LLM. Workflows are often more expensive than simpler approaches (e.g., Chain of Thought prompting) [35,38,45,53,62,90,104,105,110,134,150,157]. However, the cost is often less than hiring professionals [6,30,43,89,151], pretraining models [31,57,69,86,150], or completing the task yourself [135,156].…”

“…Another common constraint is the time for the workflow to complete [78,82,104,105]. Many workflows have lower latency than performing the same task manually, since work can be parallelized across multiple workers [8,27,47,49,78,82,85,90,120,131].…”

“…Crowdsourcing workflows integrate the user in more varied ways, including providing results without aggregation that the user can sort and filter [90,109], user guidance for prototyping [25,78,123], and worker-initiated user revision [124]. Intervention-based user revision is especially helpful for accuracy tasks.…”

What do they Really “Meme”? A Multimodal Study on ‘Siakap Langkawi’ Memes as Tools for Humour and Marketing

“…Memes are known as an intertextual grouping of images and texts which are created by social media users and disseminated online (Laineste & Voolaid, 2016); thus, they consist of various interpretations. One needs to understand the origin and history of their development (Lin et al, 2014) in order to be able to interpret the memes correctly. In meaning-making, it is important to consider the image's size, position, and composition (Jewitt & Oyama, 2001).…”