# MemeBridge: A Dataset for Benchmarking and Mitigating the Bidirectional Cultural Gap in Meme Interpretation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00491 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.00491/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 47 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [Visually Grounded Reasoning across Languages and Cultures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13238/) (2021)
- [Survey of Cultural Awareness in Language Models: Text and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00860/) (2024)
- [CultureBank: An Online Community-Driven Knowledge Base Towards Culturally Aware Language Technologies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15238/) (2024)
- [SemEval-2020 Task 8: Memotion Analysis -- The Visuo-Lingual Metaphor!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.03781/) (2020)
- [Extracting Cultural Commonsense Knowledge at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07763/) (2022)
- [CULTURE-GEN: Revealing Global Cultural Perception in Language Models through Natural Language Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10199/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Machine Translation with Cultural Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14328/) (2023)
- [Knowledge of cultural moral norms in large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01857/) (2023)
- [On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12512/) (2018)
- [Multi-lingual and Multi-cultural Figurative Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16171/) (2023)
- [MemeCap: A Dataset for Captioning and Interpreting Memes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13703/) (2023)
- [An image speaks a thousand words, but can everyone listen? On image transcreation for cultural relevance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01247/) (2024)
- [MemeMQA: Multimodal Question Answering for Memes via Rationale-Based Inferencing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11215/) (2024)
- [MEMEX: Detecting Explanatory Evidence for Memes via Knowledge-Enriched Contextualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15913/) (2023)
- [YesBut: A High-Quality Annotated Multimodal Dataset for evaluating Satire Comprehension capability of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13592/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Communicating across cultures is inherently challenging, especially through culturally dense and ambiguous formats like memes. While people expect large language models (LLMs) to hold promise for bridging such gaps, existing benchmark datasets often fail to capture the cultural context necessary for accurate interpretation. To address this, we introduce MemeBridge, a curated dataset centered on U.S.-originated memes, designed to capture two complementary perspectives: (1) how Chinese participants interpret these memes, and (2) how U.S. participants anticipate how people from other cultures might misunderstand them. Here, context refers to implicit cultural knowledge, including background beliefs, norms, and shared assumptions that shape meme comprehension. The dataset was constructed via a multi-stage crowdsourcing pipeline with rigorous validation, including human agreement checks and GPT-based classification verification. Each meme is annotated with sentiment, emotion, cultural significance, and knowledge type, providing rich supervision for downstream tasks. Notably, we observe that the anticipated misunderstandings from U.S. participants are often inaccurate, highlighting the asymmetries in cultural understanding and the challenges of adopting perspectives beyond one's own. This bidirectional framing, which focuses on both expression and perception, enables more nuanced benchmarking of cross-cultural comprehension. Our probing of multiple LLMs reveals that while models developed in different cultural contexts exhibit partial cross-cultural understanding, they often struggle with sophisticated interpretations. By contrast, fine-tuning with MemeBridge improves model performance, underscoring the value of culturally grounded resources for training and evaluating LLMs in globally diverse settings.