Using Artificial Intelligence to Fight Clickbait in Romanian News Articles

On-line press is infested with poor quality content that uses misleading headlines in order to increase web traffic and gain popularity and profit. This phenomenon is called clickbait and impacts the usability and, in some cases, even the security by exposing the user to malicious advertisement. This paper proposes an automated solution for detecting clickbait by using Natural Language Processing techniques to extract features from both the article title and the article content. The extracted features are used with a set of Machine Learning classifiers which are fine-tuned to improve the performance metrics. The resulting model shows good results and can be integrated in a news aggregator that selects only quality content for the user to read.