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

Bhuvanesh Verma, Ali Abusaleh, Alexander Mehler


Abstract
Argument Mining (AM) is a critical NLP task that remains significantly under-resourced in Arabic. This paper presents STAR-Ar, a BERT-BiLSTM-CRF architecture for argument discourse detection and classification, as our system for Daleel 2026, the inaugural Arabic argument mining shared task. The task requires the identification and classification of argumentative discourse units (ADUs) in debate and editorial texts. We jointly model these two objectives as a token-level sequence labeling task using a BERT-BiLSTM-CRF architecture that combines contextual transformer embeddings with structural transition constraints to support accurate span detection. STAR-Ar achieves an F1-score of 72.69 on validation and 73.7 on test data. Our domain-specific analysis shows that models trained exclusively on editorials underperform those trained on debates, a disparity we primarily attribute to the smaller size of the editorial dataset.
Anthology ID:
2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.163
Volume:
Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Tamer Elsayed, Houda Bouamor, Samhaa El-Beltagy, Hend Al-Khalifa, Ahmed Abdelali, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Abdellah El Mekki, Kareem Darwish, Sakhar Alkhereyf, Hamzah Luqman, Salam Khalifa, Samar Magdy, Zaid Alyafeai, Injy Hamed, Wajdi Zaghouani, Imed Zitouni
Venue:
ArabicNLP
SIG:
SIGARAB
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1304–1309
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.163/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bhuvanesh Verma, Ali Abusaleh, and Alexander Mehler. 2026. TTLab at Daleel 2026: STAR-Ar, Sequence Tagging for Argument Recognition in Arabic. In Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks, pages 1304–1309, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TTLab at Daleel 2026: STAR-Ar, Sequence Tagging for Argument Recognition in Arabic (Verma et al., ArabicNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.163.pdf