The emergence of social media as news sources has led to the rise of clickbait posts attempting to attract users to click on article links without informing them on the actual article content. This paper presents our efforts to create a clickbait detector inspired by fake news detection algorithms, and our submission to the Clickbait Challenge 2017. The detector is based almost exclusively on text-based features taken from previous work on clickbait detection, our own work on fake post detection, and features we designed specifically for the challenge. We use a two-level classification approach, combining the outputs of 65 first-level classifiers in a second-level feature vector. We present our exploratory results with individual features and their combinations, taken from the post text and the target article title, as well as feature selection. While our own blind tests with the dataset led to an F-score of 0.63, our final evaluation in the Challenge only achieved an F-score of 0.43. We explore the possible causes of this, and lay out potential future steps to achieve more successful results.
While we had no prior experience with clickbait detection, we noted a striking similarity of the task to that of fake post detection. While the task of misleading (fake) post detection @cite_2 , i.e. evaluating whether a post contains true information or not, is not the same as clickbait detection, the approach of extracting text-based features from a post and training a classifier on them is very similar, as are the expectations concerning the distinguishing features for clickbait posts and fake posts. For example, low readability or the increased presence of punctuation are related with both fake and clickbait posts. Given our previous experience with fake post detection @cite_1 , we decided to follow a similar approach for our submission to the clickbait detection challenge.
@cite_1 @cite_2
2765178803 2765545856 2907324027 2766614536
This paper presents the results and conclusions of our participation in the Clickbait Challenge 2017 on automatic clickbait detection in social media. We first describe linguistically-infused neural network models and identify informative representations to predict the level of clickbaiting present in Twitter posts. Our models allow to answer the question not only whether a post is a clickbait or not, but to what extent it is a clickbait post e.g., not at all, slightly, considerably, or heavily clickbaity using a score ranging from 0 to 1. We evaluate the predictive power of models trained on varied text and image representations extracted from tweets. Our best performing model that relies on the tweet text and linguistic markers of biased language extracted from the tweet and the corresponding page yields mean squared error (MSE) of 0.04, mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.16 and R2 of 0.43 on the held-out test data. For the binary classification setup (clickbait vs. non-clickbait), our model achieved F1 score of 0.69. We have not found that image representations combined with text yield significant performance improvement yet. Nevertheless, this work is the first to present preliminary analysis of objects extracted using Google Tensorflow object detection API from images in clickbait vs. non-clickbait Twitter posts. Finally, we outline several steps to improve model performance as a part of the future work. 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. Clickbait has grown to become a nuisance to social media users and social media operators alike. Malicious content publishers misuse social media to manipulate as many users as possible to visit their websites using clickbait messages. Machine learning technology may help to handle this problem, giving rise to automatic clickbait detection. To accelerate progress in this direction, we organized the Clickbait Challenge 2017, a shared task inviting the submission of clickbait detectors for a comparative evaluation. A total of 13 detectors have been submitted, achieving significant improvements over the previous state of the art in terms of detection performance. Also, many of the submitted approaches have been published open source, rendering them reproducible, and a good starting point for newcomers. While the 2017 challenge has passed, we maintain the evaluation system and answer to new registrations in support of the ongoing research on better clickbait detectors. 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.