TTLab at StanceEval-2026: A Cloze-Style Prompting Approach for Arabic-Language Stance Detection (CLASP-Ar)

Bhuvanesh Verma, Ali Abusaleh, Alexander Mehler


Abstract
Arabic-language stance detection remains challenging, and previous shared-task systems have largely relied on multitask learning and ensembles. While these systems achieve state-of-the-art performance, their applicability and transferability are limited by the additional complexity introduced by multitask learning. To reduce this complexity, we introduce CLASP-Ar, which reformulates the task as cloze-style masked language modeling. In this approach, the target, predicted sentiment, and text are combined into a single prompt whose [MASK] prediction is restricted to a verbalizer-constrained label vocabulary. When evaluated on the StanceEval-2026: Arabic Stance Detection Shared Task, our proposed approach achieves an Favg2 score of 71.36% on Track 1 and 74.14% on Track 2 test sets.
Anthology ID:
2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.66
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:
511–518
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.66/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bhuvanesh Verma, Ali Abusaleh, and Alexander Mehler. 2026. TTLab at StanceEval-2026: A Cloze-Style Prompting Approach for Arabic-Language Stance Detection (CLASP-Ar). In Proceedings of The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks, pages 511–518, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TTLab at StanceEval-2026: A Cloze-Style Prompting Approach for Arabic-Language Stance Detection (CLASP-Ar) (Verma et al., ArabicNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.66.pdf