Predicting Clickbait Strength in Online Social Media

Vijayasaradhi Indurthi, Bakhtiyar Syed, Manish Gupta, Vasudeva Varma

Abstract
Hoping for a large number of clicks and potentially high social shares, journalists of various news media outlets publish sensationalist headlines on social media. These headlines lure the readers to click on them and satisfy the curiosity gap in their mind. Low quality material pointed to by clickbaits leads to time wastage and annoyance for users. Even for enterprises publishing clickbaits, it hurts more than it helps as it erodes user trust, attracts wrong visitors, and produces negative signals for ranking algorithms. Hence, identifying and flagging clickbait titles is very essential. Previous work on clickbaits has majorly focused on binary classification of clickbait titles. However not all clickbaits are equally clickbaity. It is not only essential to identify a click-bait, but also to identify the intensity of the clickbait based on the strength of the clickbait. In this work, we model clickbait strength prediction as a regression problem. While previous methods have relied on traditional machine learning or vanilla recurrent neural networks, we rigorously investigate the use of transformers for clickbait strength prediction. On a benchmark dataset with ∼39K posts, our methods outperform all the existing methods in the Clickbait Challenge.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.425
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4835–4846
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.425
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.425
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vijayasaradhi Indurthi, Bakhtiyar Syed, Manish Gupta, and Vasudeva Varma. 2020. Predicting Clickbait Strength in Online Social Media. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 4835–4846, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Predicting Clickbait Strength in Online Social Media (Indurthi et al., COLING 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2020.coling-main.425.pdf
PDF Search