StanceNakba Shared Task: Actor and Topic-Aware Stance Detection in Public Discourse

Kholoud Khalil Aldous, Md. Rafiul Biswas, Mabrouka Bessghaier, Shimaa Amer Ibrahim, Kais Attia, Wajdi Zaghouani


Abstract
We present StanceNakba 2026, a shared task on stance detection in polarized social media discourse related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, organized as part of Nakba-NLP 2026 at LREC-COLING 2026. The task introduces two subtasks: Subtask A (Actor-Level Stance Detection), which classifies English social media posts as Pro-Palestine, Pro-Israel, or Neutral; and Subtask B (Cross-Topic Stance Detection), which identifies Favor, Against, or Neither stances in Arabic posts toward two conflict-related topics, normalization with Israel and refugee presence in Jordan. The task is grounded in an annotated dataset of 2,606 social media posts. A total of 7 teams participated in Subtask A, and 6 teams in Subtask B. Participating systems primarily fine-tuned Arabic and multilingual transformer-based models, including MARBERT, AraBERT, and DeBERTa-v3 variants, with several teams employing cross-validation, ensemble methods, and topic-conditioned architectures. The best-performing systems achieved a Macro F1 of 0.9620 on Subtask A and 0.8724 on Subtask B, demonstrating that transformer-based approaches are highly effective for conflict-domain stance detection while highlighting persistent challenges in cross-topic generalization and neutral class prediction
Anthology ID:
2026.nakbanlp-1.8
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:
80–90
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-nakbanlp-08
DOI:
10.63317/3jpmi9oc23t4
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kholoud Khalil Aldous, Md. Rafiul Biswas, Mabrouka Bessghaier, Shimaa Amer Ibrahim, Kais Attia, and Wajdi Zaghouani. 2026. StanceNakba Shared Task: Actor and Topic-Aware Stance Detection in Public Discourse. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources @ LREC 2026, pages 80–90, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
StanceNakba Shared Task: Actor and Topic-Aware Stance Detection in Public Discourse (Aldous et al., NakbaNLP 2026)
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