"Hope" at NakbaArchiveClassifier Shared Task: Transfer Learning-Based CNN Models for Infrastructure Damage Detection

Lojien AlKhidir, HebaTalla Abdelhady


Abstract
This paper describes Team Hope’s system for the NakbaArchiveClassifier Shared Task at Nakba-NLP 2026. The task focuses on binary classification of social media images into two categories: destruction and not_destruction. We evaluated multiple convolutional neural network architectures using transfer learning, including ResNet34, ResNet50, EfficientNet-B0, and a fine-tuned ResNet34 variant with staged training. All models were initialized with ImageNet pretrained weights and fine-tuned on the provided dataset of 2,001 images. The dataset is moderately imbalanced and contains visually diverse Instagram images depicting intact and damaged infrastructure. Our best-performing model, ResNet34 trained for 25 epochs with Adam optimizer and a learning rate of 1e-4, achieved 81% accuracy on the evaluation platform. We provide a comparative analysis of the tested architectures and discuss the impact of model depth, training duration, and class imbalance. Given the political and ethical sensitivity of the dataset, we also include a discussion of responsible AI considerations and potential limitations. Our findings suggest that moderate-depth architectures can generalize effectively in low-resource, contextually complex visual classification tasks.
Anthology ID:
2026.nakbanlp-1.25
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:
187–190
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-nakbanlp-25
DOI:
10.63317/233j9kgmifw4
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lojien AlKhidir and HebaTalla Abdelhady. 2026. "Hope" at NakbaArchiveClassifier Shared Task: Transfer Learning-Based CNN Models for Infrastructure Damage Detection. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources @ LREC 2026, pages 187–190, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
“Hope” at NakbaArchiveClassifier Shared Task: Transfer Learning-Based CNN Models for Infrastructure Damage Detection (AlKhidir & Abdelhady, NakbaNLP 2026)
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