How Curiosity can be modeled for a Clickbait Detector

The impact of continually evolving digital technologies and the proliferation of communications and content has now been widely acknowledged to be central to understanding our world. What is less acknowledged is that this is based on the successful arousing of curiosity both at the collective and individual levels. Advertisers, communication professionals and news editors are in constant competition to capture attention of the digital population perennially shifty and distracted. This paper, tries to understand how curiosity works in the digital world by attempting the first ever work done on quantifying human curiosity, basing itself on various theories drawn from humanities and social sciences. Curious communication pushes people to spot, read and click the message from their social feed or any other form of online presentation. Our approach focuses on measuring the strength of the stimulus to generate reader curiosity by using unsupervised and supervised machine learning algorithms, but is also informed by philosophical, psychological, neural and cognitive studies on this topic. Manually annotated news headlines - clickbaits - have been selected for the study, which are known to have drawn huge reader response. A binary classifier was developed based on human curiosity (unlike the work done so far using words and other linguistic features). Our classifier shows an accuracy of 97% . This work is part of the research in computational humanities on digital politics quantifying the emotions of curiosity and outrage on digital media.