DialectSentEval 2026: Arabic Dialect Sentiment Analysis and Swapping Shared Task

Saad Ezzini, Shadi Abudalfa, Maram Alharbi, Salmane Chafik, Hind Saleh Alatawi, Mo El-Haj, Ahmed Abdelali, Osamah Alnahari, Salima Lamsiyah


Abstract
Sentiment analysis is a fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Standard sentiment classification for the Arabic language remains challenging due to the high volume of dialectal Arabic. To advance research in this area, this paper proposes the Shared Task on Sentiment Analysis and Swapping in Arabic Dialects (DialectSentEval), hosted with the Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2026). This shared task consists of two subtasks: Subtask 1 focuses on multi-class and multi-dialect sentiment analysis, requiring models to identify sentiment polarity across various Arabic dialects. Subtask 2 introduces a generative task for Arabic sentiment swap, challenging models to invert sentiment polarity while preserving core semantics. In this overview paper, we present the motivation, dataset creation, and summarize the main findings from participating models.
Anthology ID:
2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.172
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:
1380–1388
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.172/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Saad Ezzini, Shadi Abudalfa, Maram Alharbi, Salmane Chafik, Hind Saleh Alatawi, Mo El-Haj, Ahmed Abdelali, Osamah Alnahari, and Salima Lamsiyah. 2026. DialectSentEval 2026: Arabic Dialect Sentiment Analysis and Swapping Shared Task. In Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks, pages 1380–1388, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DialectSentEval 2026: Arabic Dialect Sentiment Analysis and Swapping Shared Task (Ezzini et al., ArabicNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.172.pdf