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.Comment: Accepted at SIGIR 2018 as Short Pape

Clickbait detection: A literature review of the methods used

Online news portals are currently one of the fastest sources of information used by people. Its impact is due to the credibility of the news produced by actors from the media industry, which is sometimes questioned. However, one of the problems associated with this medium used to obtain information is clickbait. This technique aims to attract users to click hyperbolic headlines with content that often disappoints the reader. This study was, therefore, conducted to determine: 1) existing dataset available. 2) The method used in clickbait detection which consists of data preprocessing, analysis of features, and classification. 3) Difference steps from the method used