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arxiv 1909.03582 v1 pith:CTNHBAEM submitted 2019-09-09 cs.CL cs.HC

Clickbait? Sensational Headline Generation with Auto-tuned Reinforcement Learning

classification cs.CL cs.HC
keywords headlinessensationalreinforcementlearningmodelrewardsensationalismattention
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Sensational headlines are headlines that capture people's attention and generate reader interest. Conventional abstractive headline generation methods, unlike human writers, do not optimize for maximal reader attention. In this paper, we propose a model that generates sensational headlines without labeled data. We first train a sensationalism scorer by classifying online headlines with many comments ("clickbait") against a baseline of headlines generated from a summarization model. The score from the sensationalism scorer is used as the reward for a reinforcement learner. However, maximizing the noisy sensationalism reward will generate unnatural phrases instead of sensational headlines. To effectively leverage this noisy reward, we propose a novel loss function, Auto-tuned Reinforcement Learning (ARL), to dynamically balance reinforcement learning (RL) with maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Human evaluation shows that 60.8% of samples generated by our model are sensational, which is significantly better than the Pointer-Gen baseline and other RL models.

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    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 4.0

    Prefixing BART encoder input with bucketized CTR and length control tokens lets a single fine-tuned model generate ad headlines with controllable length and higher estimated CTR than prior baselines.