CSECU_KDE_MA at SemEval-2020 Task 8: A Neural Attention Model for Memotion Analysis

AbstractA meme is a pictorial representation of an idea or theme. In the age of emerging volume of social media platforms, memes are spreading rapidly from person to person and becoming a trending ways of opinion expression. However, due to the multimodal characteristics of meme contents, detecting and analyzing the underlying emotion of a meme is a formidable task. In this paper, we present our approach for detecting the emotion of a meme defined in the SemEval-2020 Task 8. Our team CSECU_KDE_MA employs an attention-based neural network model to tackle the problem. Upon extracting the text contents from a meme using an optical character reader (OCR), we represent it using the distributed representation of words. Next, we perform the convolution based on multiple kernel sizes to obtain the higher-level feature sequences. The feature sequences are then fed into the attentive time-distributed bidirectional LSTM model to learn the long-term dependencies effectively. Experimental results show that our proposed neural model obtained competitive performance among the participants’ systems.