ArPoMeme: An Annotated Arabic Multimodal Dataset for Political Ideology and Polarization
Researchers have introduced ArPoMeme, a new dataset containing approximately 7,300 Arabic political memes. This dataset is annotated with ideological orientations such as Leftist, Islamist, Pan-Arabist, and Satirical, as well as dimensions of polarization like Us vs. Them framing and hostility. The creation of ArPoMeme involved a semi-automated pipeline using web scraping and the Qwen2.5-VL-7B vision-language model for text extraction, followed by manual annotation via a custom interface. Analysis of the dataset indicates that Islamist and satirical memes exhibit the highest levels of hostility and mobilization cues. AI
IMPACT Provides a new resource for analyzing multimodal political discourse and detecting polarization in Arabic content.