Automated Detection of Persuasive Content in Electronic News

Abstract

Persuasive content in online news contains elements that aim to persuade its readers and may not necessarily include factual information. Since a news article only has some sentences that indicate persuasiveness, it would be quite challenging to differentiate news with or without the persuasive content. Recognizing persuasive sentences with a text summarization and classification approach is important to understand persuasive messages effectively. Text summarization identifies arguments and key points, while classification separates persuasive sentences based on the linguistic and semantic features used. Our proposed architecture includes text summarization approaches to shorten sentences without persuasive content and then using classifiers model to detect those with persuasive indication. In this paper, we compare the performance of latent semantic analysis (LSA) and TextRank in text summarization methods, the latter of which has outperformed in all trials, and also two classifiers of convolutional neural network (CNN) and bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM). We have prepared a dataset (±1700 data and manually persuasiveness-labeled) consisting of news articles written in the Indonesian language collected from a nationwide electronic news portal. Comparative studies in our experimental results show that the TextRank–BERT–BiLSTM model achieved the highest accuracy of 95% in detecting persuasive news. The text summarization methods were able to generate detailed and precise summaries of the news articles and the deep learning models were able to effectively differentiate between persuasive news and real news.