Abstract
Over the years, memes have evolved into multifaceted narratives on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit, blending text, images and audio to amplify humor and engagement. The objective of the task described in this article is to bridge the gap for individuals who may struggle to understand memes due to cultural, geographical, ancillary insights, or relevant exposure constraints, aiming to enhance meme comprehension across diverse audiences. The lack of large datasets for supervised learning and alternatives to resource-intensive vision language models have historically hindered the development of such technology. In this work, we have made strides to overcome these challenges. We introduce “MMD” a Multimodal Meme Dataset comprising 13,494 instances, including 3,134 with audio, rendering it the largest of its kind, with 2.1 times as many samples and 9.5 times as many words in the human annotated meme summary compared to the largest available meme captioning dataset, MemeCap. Our framework, MeSum (Meme Summariser), employs a fusion of Vision Transformer and Large Language Model technologies, providing an efficient alternative to resource-intensive Vision Language Models pioneering the integration of all three modalities, we attain a ROUGE-L score of 0.439, outperforming existing approaches such as zero-shot Gemini, GPT4 Vision, LLaVA and QwenVL which yield scores of 0.259, 0.213, 0.177 and 0.198. We have made our codes and datasets publicly available.