Which dataset do they use?
19538 tweets  from BIBREF4
In order to expand their reach and increase website ad revenue, media outlets have started using clickbait techniques to lure readers to click on articles on their digital platform. Having successfully enticed the user to open the article, the article fails to satiate his curiosity serving only to boost click-through rates. Initial methods for this task were dependent on feature engineering, which varies with each dataset. Industry systems have relied on an exhaustive set of rules to get the job done. Neural networks have barely been explored to perform this task. We propose a novel approach considering different textual embeddings of a news headline and the related article. We generate sub-word level embeddings of the title using Convolutional Neural Networks and use them to train a bidirectional LSTM architecture. An attention layer allows for calculation of significance of each term towards the nature of the post. We also generate Doc2Vec embeddings of the title and article text and model how they interact, following which it is concatenated with the output of the previous component. Finally, this representation is passed through a neural network to obtain a score for the headline. We test our model over 2538 posts (having trained it on 17000 records) and achieve an accuracy of 83.49% outscoring previous state-of-the-art approaches.
In recent years, content delivery has changed drastically, shifting from offline methods to the Internet. It is now the primary source of information for a majority of the populace, especially for ever-changing news updates. This has also caused a shift in users' preferred sources. Previously, these preferences were static, sticking to a particular news source. Now, with the plethora of information available easily, there is no differentiation in the source it has been gathered from, with users opting to go for whatever is convenient. Keeping up with the times, news agencies have expanded their digital presence, increasing their reach exponentially. They generate revenue by (1) advertisements on their websites, or (2) a subscription based model for articles that might interest users. Since multiple agencies offer similar content, the user has his pick. To lure in more readers and increase the number of clicks on their content, subsequently enhancing their agency's revenue, writers have begun adopting a new technique - clickbait. Merriam-Webster defines clickbait as something (such as a headline) to encourage readers to click on hyperlinks based on snippets of information accompanying it, especially when those links lead to content of dubious value or interest. It is built to create, and consequently capitalise, on the Loewenstein information gap BIBREF0 by purposefully misrepresenting or promising what can be expected while reading a story on the web, be it through a headline, image or related text. We propose a two-pronged approach to detect such headlines. The first component leverages distributional semantics of the title text and models its temporal and sequential properties. The article title is represented as a concatenation of its sub-word level embeddings. The sub-word representation serves as input to a bidirectional LSTM network. The contribution of a sub-word towards the clickbait nature of the headline is calculated in a differential manner since the output of the LSTM is passed into an attention layer BIBREF1 , following which it goes through a dense layer. The second component focuses on Doc2Vec embeddings of the title and article content, performing an element wise multiplication of the two. This is concatenated with the dense layer output from the previous component. The obtained output is then passed through multiple hidden layers which performs the final classification. Previous work in this field that has exploited the power of embeddings has considered either word vectors, for their ability to create context-sensitive word representations, or character-level word embeddings to model the orthographic features of a word. We propose the use of sub-word level representations since it incorporates the word's morphological features. Attaching an attention mechanism to it helps us identify the surprise associated with each representation within the clickbait. One of the identifying characteristics of clickbait is that the article title differs from the text attached to it. For this reason, we define a component to capture the interaction between these attributes and augment our model.