Crowdsourced Explanations for Humorous Internet Memes

The subculture of humorous images is a pervasive phenomenon on the Internet. Some social media websites (e.g. 9GAG1, Reddit and 4chan) provide platforms for people to share their images and comments. These websites are often occupied by experienced users, and most of the newcomers have trouble fitting in such communities. Among all the types of humorous images, Internet memes are relatively hard for newcomers to understand. Compared to LOLCats, face swapping or pun images, more implicit background knowledge is included in memes. Details about memess can be found in (Bauckhage 2011). Here, we define three components to form an Internet memes: meme template, set-up, and punchline. A meme template is the underlying image. Set-up and punchline are the captions superimposing on the upper and lower position of the meme template, respectively. Fig. 1 shows a meme template named “Foul Bachelor Frog” and an instance of it. In this work, we develop a system leveraging crowdsourcing technique to generate explanations for meme images. We claim that people who are not familiar with meme subculture can still quickly pick up the gist of the memes through reading the explanations.