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.
@cite_8: Clickbait detection in tweets remains an elusive challenge. In this paper, we describe the solution for the Zingel Clickbait Detector at the Clickbait Challenge 2017, which is capable of evaluating each tweet's level of click baiting. We first reformat the regression problem as a multi-classification problem, based on the annotation scheme. To perform multi-classification, we apply a token-level, self-attentive mechanism on the hidden states of bi-directional Gated Recurrent Units (biGRU), which enables the model to generate tweets' task-specific vector representations by attending to important tokens. The self-attentive neural network can be trained end-to-end, without involving any manual feature engineering. Our detector ranked first in the final evaluation of Clickbait Challenge 2017.
@cite_1: Neural machine translation is a recently proposed approach to machine translation. Unlike the traditional statistical machine translation, the neural machine translation aims at building a single neural network that can be jointly tuned to maximize the translation performance. The models proposed recently for neural machine translation often belong to a family of encoder-decoders and consists of an encoder that encodes a source sentence into a fixed-length vector from which a decoder generates a translation. In this paper, we conjecture that the use of a fixed-length vector is a bottleneck in improving the performance of this basic encoder-decoder architecture, and propose to extend this by allowing a model to automatically (soft-)search for parts of a source sentence that are relevant to predicting a target word, without having to form these parts as a hard segment explicitly. With this new approach, we achieve a translation performance comparable to the existing state-of-the-art phrase-based system on the task of English-to-French translation. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals that the (soft-)alignments found by the model agree well with our intuition.
@cite_6: Most of the online news media outlets rely heavily on the revenues generated from the clicks made by their readers, and due to the presence of numerous such outlets, they need to compete with each other for reader attention. To attract the readers to click on an article and subsequently visit the media site, the outlets often come up with catchy headlines accompanying the article links, which lure the readers to click on the link. Such headlines are known as Clickbaits. While these baits may trick the readers into clicking, in the long-run, clickbaits usually don't live up to the expectation of the readers, and leave them disappointed. In this work, we attempt to automatically detect clickbaits and then build a browser extension which warns the readers of different media sites about the possibility of being baited by such headlines. The extension also offers each reader an option to block clickbaits she doesn't want to see. Then, using such reader choices, the extension automatically blocks similar clickbaits during her future visits. We run extensive offline and online experiments across multiple media sites and find that the proposed clickbait detection and the personalized blocking approaches perform very well achieving 93 accuracy in detecting and 89 accuracy in blocking clickbaits.
@cite_0: Online content publishers often use catchy headlines for their articles in order to attract users to their websites. These headlines, popularly known as clickbaits, exploit a user’s curiosity gap and lure them to click on links that often disappoint them. Existing methods for automatically detecting clickbaits rely on heavy feature engineering and domain knowledge. Here, we introduce a neural network architecture based on Recurrent Neural Networks for detecting clickbaits. Our model relies on distributed word representations learned from a large unannotated corpora, and character embeddings learned via Convolutional Neural Networks. Experimental results on a dataset of news headlines show that our model outperforms existing techniques for clickbait detection with an accuracy of 0.98 with F1-score of 0.98 and ROC-AUC of 0.99.
@cite_16: 
@cite_11: This paper presents the results of our participation in the Clickbait Detection Challenge 2017. The system relies on a fusion of neural networks, incorporating different types of available informations. It does not require any linguistic preprocessing, and hence generalizes more easily to new domains and languages. The final combined model achieves a mean squared error of 0.0428, an accuracy of 0.826, and a F1 score of 0.564. According to the official evaluation metric the system ranked 6th of the 13 participating teams.
It was not until @cite_0 that neural networks were tried out for the task as the authors used the same news dataset as @cite_6 to develop a deep learning based model to detect clickbait. They used distributional semantics to represent article titles, and BiLSTM to model sequential data and its dependencies. Since then, @cite_11 has also experimented with Twitter data @cite_16 deploying a BiLSTM for each of the textual features (post-text, target-title, target-paragraphs, target-description, target-keywords, post-time) available in the corpus, and finally concatenating the dense output layers of the network before forwarding it to a fully connected layer. Since it was proposed in @cite_1 , the attention mechanism has been used for a variety of text-classification tasks, such as fake news detection and aspect-based sentiment analysis. @cite_8 used a self-attentive BiGRU to infer the importance of tweet tokens in predicting the annotation distribution of the task.