DeformAR: A Visual Analytics Framework for Evaluation of Arabic Named Entity Recognition

Ahmed Mustafa Younes


Abstract
Arabic Named Entity Recognition (ANER) presents challenges due to its linguistic characteristics (Qu et al., 2023). While Transformer models have advanced ANER, evaluation still relies heavily on aggregate metrics like F1 score that obscure the interplay between data characteristics, model behaviour, and error patterns. We present DeformAR, a diagnostic visual analytics framework for evaluating and diagnosing Arabic NER systems through structured, component-level analysis and interpretability. DeformAR integrates quantitative metrics with interactive visualizations to support systematic error analysis, dataset and model debugging. In a case study on ANERCorp, DeformAR identifies annotation mistakes, model calibration issues, and subcomponent interaction effects. To our knowledge, this is the first open-source framework for component-level diagnostic evaluation and interpretability in Arabic NER, available at https://github.com/ay94/DeformAR.
Anthology ID:
2026.abjadnlp-1.34
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on NLP for Languages Using Arabic Script
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Venues:
AbjadNLP | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
253–275
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.abjadnlp-1.34/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ahmed Mustafa Younes. 2026. DeformAR: A Visual Analytics Framework for Evaluation of Arabic Named Entity Recognition. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on NLP for Languages Using Arabic Script, pages 253–275, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DeformAR: A Visual Analytics Framework for Evaluation of Arabic Named Entity Recognition (Younes, AbjadNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.abjadnlp-1.34.pdf