Clickbaits are catchy headlines that are frequently used by social media outlets in order to allure its viewers into clicking them and thus leading them to dubious content. Such venal schemes thrive on exploiting the curiosity of naive social media users, directing traffic to web pages that won't be visited otherwise. In this paper, we propose a novel, semi-supervised classification based approach, that employs attentions sampled from a Gumbel-Softmax distribution to distill contexts that are fairly important in clickbait detection. An additional loss over the attention weights is used to encode prior knowledge. Furthermore, we propose a confidence network that enables learning over weak labels and improves robustness to noisy labels. We show that with merely 30 of strongly labeled samples we can achieve over 97 of the accuracy, of current state of the art methods in clickbait detection.
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.  In the first part of this paper, a regular recurrent neural network (RNN) is extended to a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN). The BRNN can be trained without the limitation of using input information just up to a preset future frame. This is accomplished by training it simultaneously in positive and negative time direction. Structure and training procedure of the proposed network are explained. In regression and classification experiments on artificial data, the proposed structure gives better results than other approaches. For real data, classification experiments for phonemes from the TIMIT database show the same tendency. In the second part of this paper, it is shown how the proposed bidirectional structure can be easily modified to allow efficient estimation of the conditional posterior probability of complete symbol sequences without making any explicit assumption about the shape of the distribution. For this part, experiments on real data are reported. 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. 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. Clickbaits are articles with misleading titles, exaggerating the content on the landing page. Their goal is to entice users to click on the title in order to monetize the landing page. The content on the landing page is usually of low quality. Their presence in user homepage stream of news aggregator sites (e.g., Yahoo news, Google news) may adversely impact user experience. Hence, it is important to identify and demote or block them on homepages. In this paper, we present a machine-learning model to detect clickbaits. We use a variety of features and show that the degree of informality of a web-page (as measured by different metrics) is a strong indicator of it being a clickbait. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our approach and analyze properties of clickbait and non-clickbait articles. Our model achieves high performance (74.9 F-1 score) in predicting clickbaits. Today's general-purpose deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) for image classification and object detection are trained offline on large static datasets. Some applications, however, will require training in real-time on live video streams with a human-in-the-loop. We refer to this class of problem as Time-ordered Online Training (ToOT) - these problems will require a consideration of not only the quantity of incoming training data, but the human effort required to tag and use it. In this paper, we define training benefit as a metric to measure the effectiveness of a sequence in using each user interaction. We demonstrate and evaluate a system tailored to performing ToOT in the field, capable of training an image classifier on a live video stream through minimal input from a human operator. We show that by exploiting the time-ordered nature of the video stream through optical flow-based object tracking, we can increase the effectiveness of human actions by about 8 times.