AISA-ArabicFC: The First Shared Task on Arabic Function Calling for Agentic AI Systems

Omer Nacar, Wareef Alzubaidi, Mohammed Alkhalifah


Abstract
Function calling connects language models to external tools, but Arabic structured tool use remains insufficiently evaluated. We present , a shared task at ArabicNLP 2026 built around 12,220 Arabic requests spanning five dialect groups and eight service domains. Each request has four candidate schemas drawn from a registry of 27 tools, including seven tools that never occur as gold calls; 223 requests require abstention. Systems decide whether to call, select a function, and extract its arguments. Two ranked tracks evaluate core calling and reasoning-trace compliance, with a third diagnostic examining dialect robustness. Twenty-two teams submitted to the blind phase, and 21 produced valid predictions on 1,125 test requests. We analyze 73 submissions and 13 system descriptions. A LoRA-adapted 4B model ranks first on both competition tracks, with scores of 0.9279 and 0.9400, while argument exact match peaks at 0.8816. However, a deterministic rule combining candidate order and released metadata matches the best observed function-name accuracy of 0.9973, limiting what this metric establishes about language understanding. Exact argument extraction provides most of the competitive separation. Maghrebi has the lowest score for every system, although its small test subset and differences in example composition limit interpretation. We provide public task data, a baseline checkpoint, the scorer, and final rankings, and document evaluation shortcuts and remaining reproducibility limitations.[<https://huggingface.co/spaces/TuwaiqAcademy/AISA-ArabicFC-Shared-Task>]
Anthology ID:
2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.198
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:
1531–1546
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.198/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Omer Nacar, Wareef Alzubaidi, and Mohammed Alkhalifah. 2026. AISA-ArabicFC: The First Shared Task on Arabic Function Calling for Agentic AI Systems. In Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks, pages 1531–1546, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
AISA-ArabicFC: The First Shared Task on Arabic Function Calling for Agentic AI Systems (Nacar et al., ArabicNLP 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.198.pdf