We used neural networks to detect clickbaits: You won’t believe what happened next!

Abstract

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.