The Hateful Memes Challenge: Detecting Hate Speech in Multimodal Memes
Douwe Kiela, Hamed Firooz, Aravind Mohan, Vedanuj Goswami, Amanpreet Singh, Pratik Ringshia, Davide Testuggine
Abstract
This work proposes a new challenge set for multimodal classification, focusing on detecting hate speech in multimodal memes. It is constructed such that unimodal models struggle and only multimodal models can succeed: difficult examples (“benign confounders”) are added to the dataset to make it hard to rely on unimodal signals. The task requires subtle reasoning, yet is straightforward to evaluate as a binary classification problem. We provide baseline performance numbers for unimodal models, as well as for multimodal models with various degrees of sophistication. We find that state-of-the-art methods perform poorly compared to humans, illustrating the difficulty of the task and highlighting the challenge that this important problem poses to the community.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{NEURIPS2020_1b84c4ce,
author = {Kiela, Douwe and Firooz, Hamed and Mohan, Aravind and Goswami, Vedanuj and Singh, Amanpreet and Ringshia, Pratik and Testuggine, Davide},
booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
editor = {H. Larochelle and M. Ranzato and R. Hadsell and M.F. Balcan and H. Lin},
pages = {2611--2624},
publisher = {Curran Associates, Inc.},
title = {The Hateful Memes Challenge: Detecting Hate Speech in Multimodal Memes},
url = {https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2020/file/1b84c4cee2b8b3d823b30e2d604b1878-Paper.pdf},
volume = {33},
year = {2020}
}