TotalDefMeme: A Multi-Attribute Meme dataset on Total Defence in Singapore
Total Defence is a defence policy combining and extending the concept of
military defence and civil defence. While several countries have adopted total
defence as their defence policy, very few studies have investigated its
effectiveness. With the rapid proliferation of social media and digitalisation,
many social studies have been focused on investigating policy effectiveness
through specially curated surveys and questionnaires either through digital
media or traditional forms. However, such references may not truly reflect the
underlying sentiments about the target policies or initiatives of interest.
People are more likely to express their sentiment using communication mediums
such as starting topic thread on forums or sharing memes on social media. Using
Singapore as a case reference, this study aims to address this research gap by
proposing TotalDefMeme, a large-scale multi-modal and multi-attribute meme
dataset that captures public sentiments toward Singapore's Total Defence
policy. Besides supporting social informatics and public policy analysis of the
Total Defence policy, TotalDefMeme can also support many downstream multi-modal
machine learning tasks, such as aspect-based stance classification and
multi-modal meme clustering. We perform baseline machine learning experiments
on TotalDefMeme and evaluate its technical validity, and present possible
future interdisciplinary research directions and application scenarios using
the dataset as a baseline.