FigSIM: A Dataset for Fine-grained Suicide Severity and Figurative Language in Suicide Memes
2026-06-01 • Computation and Language
Computation and LanguageComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionComputers and Society
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied "suicide memes," which are internet images that talk about suicide. They created a new collection called FigSIM with over 1,000 memes, each labeled for how serious the suicide message is, the use of figurative language like metaphors, and specific suicide details shown. They tested different computer models to see how well they can detect these features and found it's hard, especially when memes use metaphors. Their work highlights challenges in automatically spotting harmful suicide-related memes and includes the dataset for others to use.
suicide memescontent moderationfigurative languagemetaphorsdataset annotationmultimodal modelssuicide severity levelssocial mediaautomated detectionFigSIM dataset
Authors
Liuliu Chen, Elise R. Carrotte, Brian E. Chapman, Jo Robinson, Mike Conway
Abstract
Suicide memes are memes used to express suicide-related thoughts or comment on suicide-related issues. Suicide memes are increasingly common on social media, yet remain poorly understood and potentially harmful. There is an urgent need to better understand their characteristics and to develop appropriate content moderation strategies that limits users' exposure to potentially harmful content. Currently, the absence of annotated datasets of suicide memes remains a key barrier to developing and evaluating automated moderation approaches. In this paper, we introduce FigSIM, the first dataset designed for fine-grained analysis of suicide memes. The dataset consists of 1049 memes, each annotated for (1) fine-grained suicide severity levels, (2) figurative phenomena (e.g., metaphors), and (3) suicide-related content (e.g., suicide method depiction). We benchmark 16 unimodal and multimodal models across three tasks: figurative language, suicide severity, and suicide-related content detection. Overall, FigSIM demonstrates that suicide memes pose unique challenges for both modeling and content moderation. Analysis revealed biases, such as underprediction of higher suicide severity levels, especially for figurative memes. The dataset (including splits used for analyses) is publicly available. Content Warning: This paper contains suicide-related content that may be triggering.