@inproceedings{shlkamy-zaghouani-2026-northwestern,
title = "Northwestern 2 at {BAREC} Shared Task 2026: {CAM}e{LBERT}-Mix for Fine-Grained {A}rabic Readability Assessment",
author = "Shlkamy, Eman Sedqy and
Zaghouani, Wajdi",
editor = "Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad and
Elsayed, Tamer and
Bouamor, Houda and
El-Beltagy, Samhaa and
Al-Khalifa, Hend and
Abdelali, Ahmed and
Elmadany, AbdelRahim and
El Mekki, Abdellah and
Darwish, Kareem and
Alkhereyf, Sakhar and
Luqman, Hamzah and
Khalifa, Salam and
Magdy, Samar and
Alyafeai, Zaid and
Hamed, Injy and
Zaghouani, Wajdi and
Zitouni, Imed",
booktitle = "Proceedings of The Fourth {A}rabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.19/",
pages = "175--178",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-497-2",
abstract = "This paper presents the Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) submission to Task{~}1 of the BAREC Shared Task 2026 on fine-grained Arabic readability assessment. The task requires predicting the readability level of Arabic sentences across 19 ordered readability levels. Our system fine-tunes CAMeLBERT-Mix as a 19-class classifier using the official BAREC training data and cross-entropy optimization. We evaluate the proposed system using Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK), the official shared-task evaluation metric, together with classification accuracy. Our submitted system achieves a validation QWK of 0.7393 and an accuracy of 45.96{\%}, indicating that pretrained Arabic language models provide a strong baseline for fine-grained Arabic readability assessment."
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<abstract>This paper presents the Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) submission to Task 1 of the BAREC Shared Task 2026 on fine-grained Arabic readability assessment. The task requires predicting the readability level of Arabic sentences across 19 ordered readability levels. Our system fine-tunes CAMeLBERT-Mix as a 19-class classifier using the official BAREC training data and cross-entropy optimization. We evaluate the proposed system using Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK), the official shared-task evaluation metric, together with classification accuracy. Our submitted system achieves a validation QWK of 0.7393 and an accuracy of 45.96%, indicating that pretrained Arabic language models provide a strong baseline for fine-grained Arabic readability assessment.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Northwestern 2 at BAREC Shared Task 2026: CAMeLBERT-Mix for Fine-Grained Arabic Readability Assessment
%A Shlkamy, Eman Sedqy
%A Zaghouani, Wajdi
%Y Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad
%Y Elsayed, Tamer
%Y Bouamor, Houda
%Y El-Beltagy, Samhaa
%Y Al-Khalifa, Hend
%Y Abdelali, Ahmed
%Y Elmadany, AbdelRahim
%Y El Mekki, Abdellah
%Y Darwish, Kareem
%Y Alkhereyf, Sakhar
%Y Luqman, Hamzah
%Y Khalifa, Salam
%Y Magdy, Samar
%Y Alyafeai, Zaid
%Y Hamed, Injy
%Y Zaghouani, Wajdi
%Y Zitouni, Imed
%S Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-497-2
%F shlkamy-zaghouani-2026-northwestern
%X This paper presents the Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) submission to Task 1 of the BAREC Shared Task 2026 on fine-grained Arabic readability assessment. The task requires predicting the readability level of Arabic sentences across 19 ordered readability levels. Our system fine-tunes CAMeLBERT-Mix as a 19-class classifier using the official BAREC training data and cross-entropy optimization. We evaluate the proposed system using Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK), the official shared-task evaluation metric, together with classification accuracy. Our submitted system achieves a validation QWK of 0.7393 and an accuracy of 45.96%, indicating that pretrained Arabic language models provide a strong baseline for fine-grained Arabic readability assessment.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.19/
%P 175-178
Markdown (Informal)
[Northwestern 2 at BAREC Shared Task 2026: CAMeLBERT-Mix for Fine-Grained Arabic Readability Assessment](https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.19/) (Shlkamy & Zaghouani, ArabicNLP 2026)
ACL