Online Polarization Detection in Persian (Farsi) Social Media

Saeedeh Davoudi, Nazli Goharian


Abstract
Polarization detection in low-resource and mid-resource languages remains a significant challenge for social understanding. This paper presents the first comprehensive benchmark to evaluate transformer-based models for detection of polarized language in Persian (also called Farsi) social media. The aim is to evaluate 1) how and if finetuning the pre-trained models have substantial impact; 2) how Persian specific monolingual models compare to multilingual for this task; 3) how and if transfer learning from models trained on other languages such as culturally-distant English, and culturally-close[er] Turkish, and Arabic can be of interest for this task; and 4) how competitive Large Language Models (LLMs) are in a zero-shot setting. Our evaluation of ten transformer-based models and two LLMs on a publicly available Farsi polarization dataset shows promising findings,highlighting both the strengths and limitations of each approach.
Anthology ID:
2026.silkroadnlp-1.6
Volume:
The Proceedings of the First Workshop on NLP and LLMs for the Iranian Language Family
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Rayyan Merchant, Karine Megerdoomian
Venues:
SilkRoadNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
50–59
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.silkroadnlp-1.6/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Saeedeh Davoudi and Nazli Goharian. 2026. Online Polarization Detection in Persian (Farsi) Social Media. In The Proceedings of the First Workshop on NLP and LLMs for the Iranian Language Family, pages 50–59, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Online Polarization Detection in Persian (Farsi) Social Media (Davoudi & Goharian, SilkRoadNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.silkroadnlp-1.6.pdf