Clustering Internet Memes Through Template Matching and Multi-Dimensional Similarity

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bloem, Tygo, Ilievski, Filip
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Bloem, Tygo
Ilievski, Filip
author_facet Bloem, Tygo
Ilievski, Filip
contents Meme clustering is critical for toxicity detection, virality modeling, and typing, but it has received little attention in previous research. Clustering similar Internet memes is challenging due to their multimodality, cultural context, and adaptability. Existing approaches rely on databases, overlook semantics, and struggle to handle diverse dimensions of similarity. This paper introduces a novel method that uses template-based matching with multi-dimensional similarity features, thus eliminating the need for predefined databases and supporting adaptive matching. Memes are clustered using local and global features across similarity categories such as form, visual content, text, and identity. Our combined approach outperforms existing clustering methods, producing more consistent and coherent clusters, while similarity-based feature sets enable adaptability and align with human intuition. We make all supporting code publicly available to support subsequent research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_00056
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Clustering Internet Memes Through Template Matching and Multi-Dimensional Similarity
Bloem, Tygo
Ilievski, Filip
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Multimedia
Meme clustering is critical for toxicity detection, virality modeling, and typing, but it has received little attention in previous research. Clustering similar Internet memes is challenging due to their multimodality, cultural context, and adaptability. Existing approaches rely on databases, overlook semantics, and struggle to handle diverse dimensions of similarity. This paper introduces a novel method that uses template-based matching with multi-dimensional similarity features, thus eliminating the need for predefined databases and supporting adaptive matching. Memes are clustered using local and global features across similarity categories such as form, visual content, text, and identity. Our combined approach outperforms existing clustering methods, producing more consistent and coherent clusters, while similarity-based feature sets enable adaptability and align with human intuition. We make all supporting code publicly available to support subsequent research.
title Clustering Internet Memes Through Template Matching and Multi-Dimensional Similarity
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00056