Vaibhav Kumar

Identifying Clickbait: A Multi-Strategy Approach Using Neural Networks

In an age where people are becoming increasing likely to trust information found through online media, journalists have begun employing techniques to lure readers to articles by using catchy headlines, called clickbait. These headlines entice the user into clicking through the article whilst not providing information relevant to the headline itself. Previous methods of detecting clickbait have explored techniques heavily dependent on feature engineering, with little experimentation having been tried with neural network architectures. We introduce a novel model combining recurrent neural networks, attention layers and image embeddings. Our model uses a combination of distributed word embeddings derived from unannotated corpora, character level embeddings calculated through Convolutional Neural Networks. These representations are passed through a bidirectional LSTM with an attention layer. The image embeddings are also learnt from large data using CNNs. Experimental results show that our model achieves an F1 score of 65.37% beating the previous benchmark of 55.21%.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 posts 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.

HRAM: A Hybrid Recurrent Attention Machine for News Recommendation

Popular methods for news recommendation which are based on collaborative filtering and content-based filtering have multiple drawbacks. The former method does not account for the sequential nature of news reading and suffers from the problem of cold-start, while the latter, suffers from over-specialization. In order to address these issues for news recommendation we propose a Hybrid Recurrent Attention Machine (HRAM). HRAM consists of two components. The first component utilizes a neural network for matrix factorization. While in the second component, we first learn the distributed representation of each news article. We then use the historical data of the user in a sequential manner and feed it to an attention-based recurrent layer. Finally, we concatenate the outputs from both these components and use further hidden layers in order to make predictions. In this way, we harness the information present in the user reading history and boost it with the information available through collaborative filtering for providing better news recommendations. Extensive experiments over two real-world datasets show that the proposed model provides significant improvement over the state-of-the-art.

Weave&Rec: A Word Embedding based 3-D Convolutional Network for News Recommendation

An effective news recommendation system should harness the historical information of the user based on her interactions as well as the content of the articles. In this paper we propose a novel deep learning model for news recommendation which utilizes the content of the news articles as well as the sequence in which the articles were read by the user. To model both of these information, which are essentially of different types, we propose a simple yet effective architecture which utilizes a 3-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network which takes the word embeddings of the articles present in the user history as its input. Using such a method endows the model with the capability to automatically learn spatial (features of a particular article) as well as temporal features (features across articles read by a user) which signify the interest of the user. At test time, we use this in combination with a 2-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network for recommending articles to users. On a real-world dataset our method outperformed strong baselines which also model the news recommendation problem using neural networks.