Identifying Clickbait: A Multi-Strategy Approach Using Neural Networks

TL;DR

This paper presents a multi-strategy neural network approach for clickbait detection that integrates text, image, and source-target similarity analysis, achieving state-of-the-art results on social media posts.

Contribution

It introduces a novel neural network model combining bidirectional LSTM with attention, Siamese networks, and image embeddings to improve clickbait detection beyond feature engineering methods.

Findings

Achieved an F1 score of 65.37% on a large social media dataset.

Outperformed previous state-of-the-art methods in clickbait detection.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of integrating image data with text analysis.

Abstract

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.