Yafa at StanceNakba: Actor-Level Stance Detection Using Cross-Lingual Approach

Tasnim Zayet, Osama Hamed, Tasneem Duridi


Abstract
This paper addresses the problem of actor-level stance detection in English social media posts concerning the Palestinian issue, a subtask of the StanceNakba-2026 Shared Task. The objective is to classify posts into one of three categories: Pro-Palestine, Pro-Israel, or Neutral, which is more challenging than the traditional favor/against/neutral formulations. This study uses a dataset comprising 1,401 posts, collected from X (formerly Twitter) after October 7, 2023, and annotated with one of the three stance labels. As Yafa’s Team, we tried to solve this problem using BERT-based models, which have proven their superiority in similar tasks. Several BERT-based models were fine-tuned and compared, including ARBERT, MARBERT, and PoliBERTweet, among others. Our winning model is the “MARBERT-Y”, where the “Y” comes from Yafa, a MARBERT-based model that has achieved a macro-F1 score of 95% on the test set. We argue this to two main factors: the structured and harsh preprocessing steps applied and the fine-tuning process employed. This indicates that domain-adapted transformer models, i.e., those pretrained on large-scale Twitter data are highly effective for politically stance detection tasks.
Anthology ID:
2026.nakbanlp-1.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Mustafa Jarrar, Mo El-Haj, Amal Haddad, Serin Atiani, Shadi Abudalfa, Terry Regier, Paul Rayson, Khalil Sima’an, Camille Mansour
Venues:
NakbaNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
177–181
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-nakbanlp-23
DOI:
10.63317/4pzmawd3avoy
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tasnim Zayet, Osama Hamed, and Tasneem Duridi. 2026. Yafa at StanceNakba: Actor-Level Stance Detection Using Cross-Lingual Approach. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources @ LREC 2026, pages 177–181, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Yafa at StanceNakba: Actor-Level Stance Detection Using Cross-Lingual Approach (Zayet et al., NakbaNLP 2026)
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