SWDE : A Sub-Word And Document Embedding Based Engine for Clickbait Detection

In order to expand their reach and increase website ad revenue, media outlets have started using clickbait techniques to lure readers to click on articles on their digital platform. Having successfully enticed the user to open the article, the article fails to satiate his curiosity serving only to boost click-through rates. Initial methods for this task were dependent on feature engineering, which varies with each dataset. Industry systems have relied on an exhaustive set of rules to get the job done. Neural networks have barely been explored to perform this task. We propose a novel approach considering different textual embeddings of a news headline and the related article. We generate sub-word level embeddings of the title using Convolutional Neural Networks and use them to train a bidirectional LSTM architecture. An attention layer allows for calculation of significance of each term towards the nature of the post. We also generate Doc2Vec embeddings of the title and article text and model how they interact, following which it is concatenated with the output of the previous component. Finally, this representation is passed through a neural network to obtain a score for the headline. We test our model over 2538 posts (having trained it on 17000 records) and achieve an accuracy of 83.49% outscoring previous state-of-the-art approaches.

Identifying Clickbait: A Multi-Strategy Approach Using Neural Networks

Online media outlets, in a bid to expand their reach and subsequently increase revenue through ad monetisation, have begun adopting clickbait techniques to lure readers to click on articles. The article fails to fulfill the promise made by the headline. Traditional methods for clickbait detection have relied heavily on feature engineering which, in turn, is dependent on the dataset it is built for. The application of neural networks for this task has only been explored partially. We propose a novel approach considering all information found in a social media post. We train a bidirectional LSTM with an attention mechanism to learn the extent to which a word contributes to the post's clickbait score in a differential manner. We also employ a Siamese net to capture the similarity between source and target information. Information gleaned from images has not been considered in previous approaches. We learn image embeddings from large amounts of data using Convolutional Neural Networks to add another layer of complexity to our model. Finally, we concatenate the outputs from the three separate components, serving it as input to a fully connected layer. We conduct experiments over a test corpus of 19538 social media posts, attaining an F1 score of 65.37% on the dataset bettering the previous state-of-the-art, as well as other proposed approaches, feature engineering or otherwise.