Artificial intelligent software has been trained to detect and flag up clickbait headlines.
And here at El Reg we say thank God Larry Wall for that. What the internet needs right now is software to highlight and expunge dodgy article titles about space alien immigrants, faked moon landings, and the like.
Machine-learning eggheads continue to push the boundaries of natural language processing, and have crafted a model that can, supposedly, detect how clickbait-y a headline really is.
The system uses a convolutional neural network that converts the words in a submitted article title into vectors. These numbers are fed into a long-short-term memory network that spits out a score based on the headline’s clickbait strength. About eight times out of ten it agreed with humans on whether a title was clickbaity or not, we’re told.
The trouble is, what exactly is a clickbait headline? It’s a tough question. The AI’s team – from the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad, the Manipal Institute of Technology, and Birla Institute of Technology, in India – decided to rely on the venerable Merriam-Webster dictionary to define clickbait.
Robin Edgar
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