CasbAI at AraSentEval 2026: Robust Dialectal Arabic Sentiment Classification via Multi-Seed Ensembling and Data Augmentation.

Chaima Abdelaziz, KahinaHouda Saadaoui, Faiza BELBACHIR, Lynda Said Lhadj


Abstract
This paper describes the system we designed for our participation in the AraSentEval 2026 shared task on Arabic dialectal sentiment analysis. We propose a transformer-based approach relying on MARBERT combined with a multi-seed ensemble strategy and several optimization techniques. Our system integrates seven independently trained models with different random initializations and applies Stochastic Weight Averaging (SWA) to improve generalization. To address class imbalance, we augment the training data through dialectal synonym replacement, increasing the dataset size by 13.9% while preserving dialect distribution. In addition, we incorporate Test-Time Augmentation (TTA) and investigate the use of pseudo-labeling based on high-confidence predictions. We report our experiments on the official dataset covering Moroccan, Egyptian, Jordanian, and Saudi dialects, and analyze the contribution of each component through ablation experiments. Our system achieved a macro F1-score of 84.62% on the test set, ranking 3rd among 15 participating teams.
Anthology ID:
2026.osact-1.38
Volume:
The 7th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT7) with 5 Shared Tasks
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Hend Al-Khalifa, Mo El-Haj, Saad Ezzini
Venues:
OSACT | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
278–283
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-osact-38
DOI:
10.63317/32cq3gywnhjs
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chaima Abdelaziz, KahinaHouda Saadaoui, Faiza BELBACHIR, and Lynda Said Lhadj. 2026. CasbAI at AraSentEval 2026: Robust Dialectal Arabic Sentiment Classification via Multi-Seed Ensembling and Data Augmentation.. In The 7th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT7) with 5 Shared Tasks, pages 278–283, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CasbAI at AraSentEval 2026: Robust Dialectal Arabic Sentiment Classification via Multi-Seed Ensembling and Data Augmentation. (Abdelaziz et al., OSACT 2026)
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