Clickbait is a pejorative term describing web content that is aimed at generating online advertising revenue, especially at the expense of quality or accuracy, relying on sensationalist headlines or eye-catching thumbnail pictures to attract click-throughs and to encourage forwarding of the material over online social networks. We use distributed word representations of the words in the title as features to identify clickbaits in online news media. We train a machine learning model using linear regression to predict the cickbait score of a given tweet. Our methods achieve an F1-score of 64.98 and an MSE of 0.0791. Compared to other methods, our method is simple, fast to train, does not require extensive feature engineering and yet moderately effective.
Unlike earlier work done on clickbaits, the clickbait challenge @cite_8 requires us to calculate a clickbait score of a tweet post.
@cite_8
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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 (headlines) make use of misleading titles that hide critical information from or exaggerate the content on the landing target pages to entice clicks. As clickbaits often use eye-catching wording to attract viewers, target contents are often of low quality. Clickbaits are especially widespread on social media such as Twitter, adversely impacting user experience by causing immense dissatisfaction. Hence, it has become increasingly important to put forward a widely applicable approach to identify and detect clickbaits. In this paper, we make use of a dataset from the clickbait challenge 2017 (clickbait-challenge.com) comprising of over 21,000 headlines titles, each of which is annotated by at least five judgments from crowdsourcing on how clickbait it is. We attempt to build an effective computational clickbait detection model on this dataset. We first considered a total of 331 features, filtered out many features to avoid overfitting and improve the running time of learning, and eventually selected the 60 most important features for our final model. Using these features, Random Forest Regression achieved the following results: MSE=0.035 MSE, Accuracy=0.82, and F1-sore=0.61 on the clickbait class. The purpose of a clickbait is to make a link so appealing that people click on it. However, the content of such articles is often not related to the title, shows poor quality, and at the end leaves the reader unsatisfied. To help the readers, the organizers of the clickbait challenge (this http URL) asked the participants to build a machine learning model for scoring articles with respect to their "clickbaitness". In this paper we propose to solve the clickbait problem with an ensemble of Linear SVM models, and our approach was tested successfully in the challenge: it showed great performance of 0.036 MSE and ranked 3rd among all the solutions to the contest. 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.