  With the ever decreasing attention span of contemporary Internet users, the
title of online content (such as a news article or video) can be a major factor
in determining its popularity. To take advantage of this phenomenon, we propose
a new method based on a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural
network designed to predict the popularity of online content using only its
title. We evaluate the proposed architecture on two distinct datasets of news
articles and news videos distributed in social media that contain over 40,000
samples in total. On those datasets, our approach improves the performance over
traditional shallow approaches by a margin of 15%. Additionally, we show that
using pre-trained word vectors in the embedding layer improves the results of
LSTM models, especially when the training set is small. To our knowledge, this
is the first attempt of applying popularity prediction using only textual
information from the title.
