Recurrent Neural Networks for Online Video Popularity Prediction

In this paper, we address the problem of popularity prediction of online videos shared in social media. We prove that this challenging task can be approached using recently proposed deep neural network architectures. We cast the popularity prediction problem as a classification task and we aim to solve it using only visual cues extracted from videos. To that end, we propose a new method based on a Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Network (LRCN) that incorporates the sequentiality of the information in the model. Results obtained on a dataset of over 37'000 videos published on Facebook show that using our method leads to over 30% improvement in prediction performance over the traditional shallow approaches and can provide valuable insights for content creators

Shallow reading with Deep Learning: Predicting popularity of online content using only its title

With the ever decreasing attention span of contemporary Internet users, the title of online content (such as a news article or video) can be a major factor in determining its popularity. To take advantage of this phenomenon, we propose a new method based on a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network designed to predict the popularity of online content using only its title. We evaluate the proposed architecture on two distinct datasets of news articles and news videos distributed in social media that contain over 40,000 samples in total. On those datasets, our approach improves the performance over traditional shallow approaches by a margin of 15%. Additionally, we show that using pre-trained word vectors in the embedding layer improves the results of LSTM models, especially when the training set is small. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt of applying popularity prediction using only textual information from the title

Multichannel Attention Network for Analyzing Visual Behavior in Public Speaking

Public speaking is an important aspect of human communication and interaction. The majority of computational work on public speaking concentrates on analyzing the spoken content, and the verbal behavior of the speakers. While the success of public speaking largely depends on the content of the talk, and the verbal behavior, non-verbal (visual) cues, such as gestures and physical appearance also play a significant role. This paper investigates the importance of visual cues by estimating their contribution towards predicting the popularity of a public lecture. For this purpose, we constructed a large database of more than $1800$ TED talk videos. As a measure of popularity of the TED talks, we leverage the corresponding (online) viewers' ratings from YouTube. Visual cues related to facial and physical appearance, facial expressions, and pose variations are extracted from the video frames using convolutional neural network (CNN) models. Thereafter, an attention-based long short-term memory (LSTM) network is proposed to predict the video popularity from the sequence of visual features. The proposed network achieves state-of-the-art prediction accuracy indicating that visual cues alone contain highly predictive information about the popularity of a talk. Furthermore, our network learns a human-like attention mechanism, which is particularly useful for interpretability, i.e. how attention varies with time, and across different visual cues by indicating their relative importance