ADAB: Arabic Dataset for Automated Politeness Benchmarking - a Large-Scale Resource for Computational Sociopragmatics

Hend Al-Khalifa, Nadia Ghezaiel, Maria Bounnit, Hend Hamed Alhazmi, Noof Abdullah Alfear, Reem Fahad Alqifari, Ameera Masoud Almasoud, Sharefah Ahmed Al-Ghamdi


Abstract
The growing importance of culturally-aware natural language processing systems has led to an increasing demand for resources that capture sociopragmatic phenomena across diverse languages. Nevertheless, Arabic-language resources for politeness detection remain severely under-explored, despite the rich and complex politeness expressions deeply embedded in Arabic communication. In this paper, a new annotated Arabic dataset, called ADAB/أدب (Arabic Politeness Dataset), was generated and carefully collected from four diverse online platforms including social media, e-commerce, and customer service domains, encompassing both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and multiple dialectal varieties (Gulf, Egyptian, Levantine, and Maghrebi). This dataset has undergone a thorough annotation process guided by Arabic linguistic traditions and contemporary pragmatic theory, resulting in three-way politeness classifications: polite, impolite, and neutral. The generated dataset contains 10,000 samples with detailed linguistic feature annotations across 16 politeness categories, achieving substantial inter-annotator agreement (κ = 0.703). A comprehensive benchmarking of this dataset was conducted utilizing 40 model configurations spanning traditional machine learning (12 models), transformer-based architecture (10 models), and large language models (18 configurations), thereby effectively demonstrating its practical utility and inherent challenges. This generated resource aims to bridge the gap in Arabic sociopragmatic NLP and encourage further research into politeness-aware applications for the Arabic language.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.244
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
3128–3137
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-244
DOI:
10.63317/559a7pqqchr2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hend Al-Khalifa, Nadia Ghezaiel, Maria Bounnit, Hend Hamed Alhazmi, Noof Abdullah Alfear, Reem Fahad Alqifari, Ameera Masoud Almasoud, and Sharefah Ahmed Al-Ghamdi. 2026. ADAB: Arabic Dataset for Automated Politeness Benchmarking - a Large-Scale Resource for Computational Sociopragmatics. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3128–3137, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
ADAB: Arabic Dataset for Automated Politeness Benchmarking - a Large-Scale Resource for Computational Sociopragmatics (Al-Khalifa et al., LREC 2026)
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