arXiv AI

BARRAC: Adaptation of an English Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis Approach for Classification Tasks in Arabic Dialects

The paper introduces BARRAC, a method that adapts an English aspect‑based sentiment analysis framework for Arabic dialect classification tasks. It replaces English consumer‑review attribute pools with Arabic linguistic markers for sentiment, sarcasm, and dialect identification, and swaps noisy self‑training for a two‑stage training process. Evaluated on five Arabic dialect datasets, BARRAC achieves a mean macro‑F1 of 63.93%, surpassing the best few‑label state‑of‑the‑art by 3% and outperforming GPT‑4o on four of the five tasks, while error analysis highlights remaining challenges.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Why Current XAI Is Not Enough for Arabic NLP: A Critical Survey of the Explainability Gap

The paper surveys the state of Explainable AI (XAI) in Arabic NLP, highlighting three gaps: a method gap where Arabic XAI relies mainly on limited post‑hoc techniques; a task gap with most work focused on classification tasks and little on generation, retrieval, or dialogue; and a linguistic gap where explanations rarely address Arabic‑specific phenomena such as morphology, dialects, and diglossia. It proposes a taxonomy of tasks, methods, linguistic units, and evaluation practices, and outlines a research agenda for linguistically grounded Arabic XAI.

By Salima Lamsiyah, Ruslan Mitkov
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

TTLab at StanceEval-2026: A Cloze-Style Prompting Approach for Arabic-Language Stance Detection (CLASP-Ar)

The paper introduces CLASP‑Ar, a cloze‑style prompting method for Arabic stance detection that replaces complex multitask learning and ensembles with a single masked language modeling prompt. By combining the target, predicted sentiment, and text into one prompt and constraining the [MASK] prediction to a verbalizer‑defined label set, the approach aims to simplify the task while maintaining performance.

By Bhuvanesh Verma, Ali Abusaleh, Alexander Mehler
arXiv AI
3d ago

TTLab at Daleel 2026: STAR-Ar, Sequence Tagging for Argument Recognition in Arabic

The paper introduces STAR‑Ar, a BERT‑BiLSTM‑CRF model designed for the Daleel 2026 Arabic argument mining shared task. It treats argument discourse unit detection and classification as a token‑level sequence labeling problem, achieving an F1‑score of 72.69 on validation and 73.7 on test data. Analysis shows that models trained only on editorial texts perform worse than those trained on debates, mainly due to the smaller editorial dataset.

By Bhuvanesh Verma, Ali Abusaleh, Alexander Mehler
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

E-CONAN (Entailment, CONtradition And Neutral) Benchmarks: Arabic Textual Entailment and Natural Inference Datasets

E-CONAN introduces Arabic textual entailment and natural inference benchmarks comprising two datasets: E-CONAN-2 (2-way RTE) and E-CONAN-3 (3-way NLI). The datasets are built from automatically-translated pairs, human-validated machine translations, hand-crafted pairs from Arabic teaching books, and rumor-containing news headlines. The authors evaluated nine multilingual pretrained models and five large language models on these benchmarks, demonstrating that E-CONAN offers a more diverse and robust assessment than existing datasets like XNLI and ArNLI.

By Khloud AL Jallad, Nada Ghneim, Ghaida Rebdawi
arXiv AI
Aug 25

ProBel: Propaganda Detection with Techniques, Spans, and Explanations

ProBel is a bilingual Arabic and English resource for propaganda detection that aligns binary labels, multi-label annotations for 23 propaganda techniques grouped into six categories, technique-labeled spans, and reference explanations for news sentences. The dataset supports matched binary, coarse-grained, multi-label, and span-level tasks in both languages, and the authors evaluate zero‑shot prompting, task‑specific fine‑tuning, and joint training. A single bilingual multi‑task model achieves the best overall performance, with cross‑task analysis revealing that joint classification preserves binary performance while span‑only training can weaken sentence‑level prediction, and that joint bilingual training yields the most stable results.

By Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi, Ali Ezzat Shahroor, Elisa Sartori, Giovanni Da San Martino, Firoj Alam
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Nuha-Speech: Building General-Purpose Arabic Speech-LLMs

Nuha‑Speech is a new initiative aimed at creating general‑purpose Arabic speech‑large language models (speech‑LLMs). It includes the construction of a large Arabic Speech Question‑Answering corpus with over 1.5 million samples for instruction tuning, supervised fine‑tuning of Qwen‑Omni model variants at various scales, and a systematic evaluation framework with diverse tasks and tailored metrics. The project seeks to establish foundational infrastructure for Arabic speech‑LLMs amid limited Arabic speech resources.

By Yingzhi Wang, Reem Alhazzani, Muhammad Alqurishi
arXiv AI
Aug 25

AraDetox: A Multi-Dialect Arabic Detoxification Dataset

AraDetox is a newly released multi-dialect Arabic detoxification dataset containing 10,500 harmful social‑media posts and 84,000 detoxified rewrites generated by GPT‑5 and Gemini 2.5 Flash across Modern Standard Arabic, Gulf, Levantine, and Egyptian Arabic. Human evaluation and automatic analyses confirm that the rewrites effectively remove harmful language while preserving meaning, lexical change, and dialectal style. The dataset is publicly available to support future research in Arabic detoxification, safe text generation, and multi‑dialect NLP.

By Mo El-Haj