Title: Learning to Identify Ambiguous and Misleading News Headlines,
Abstract: Accuracy is one of the basic principles of journalism. However, it is
increasingly hard to manage due to the diversity of news media. Some editors of
online news tend to use catchy headlines which trick readers into clicking.
These headlines are either ambiguous or misleading, degrading the reading
experience of the audience. Thus, identifying inaccurate news headlines is a
task worth studying. Previous work names these headlines "clickbaits" and
mainly focus on the features extracted from the headlines, which limits the
performance since the consistency between headlines and news bodies is
underappreciated. In this paper, we clearly redefine the problem and identify
ambiguous and misleading headlines separately. We utilize class sequential
rules to exploit structure information when detecting ambiguous headlines. For
the identification of misleading headlines, we extract features based on the
congruence between headlines and bodies. To make use of the large unlabeled
data set, we apply a co-training method and gain an increase in performance.
The experiment results show the effectiveness of our methods. Then we use our
classifiers to detect inaccurate headlines crawled from different sources and
conduct a data analysis.