This paper presents our submission to the AdabEval 2026 shared task on Arabic politeness classification and pragmatic category prediction. We explored a range of Arabic-specific and multilingual transformer models and integrated their outputs through an ensemble strategy. Our approach achieved state-of-the-art performance in the shared task, ranking first in both subtasks with a macro-F1 score of 0.89 and an accuracy of 0.93 on subtask A, and a macro-F1 score of 0.58 on subtask B. Although our approach delivered high performance on overall politeness classification, pragmatic category prediction remains more challenging. Despite achieving the top ranking in this subtask, the comparatively lower macro-F1 score suggests that modelling fine-grained pragmatic functions requires further methodological refinement and experimentation.

The spoken Arabic exhibits substantial dialectal variation in the Arabic-speaking world. This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of Arabic dialectal variation using the SADA corpus, examining lexical, morphosyntactic, and discourse-pragmatic patterns across dialects. We combine quantitative frequency-based measures with qualitative linguistic analysis, including keyword comparison, distributional profiling, collocational and trigram analyses, and similarity-based clustering. Our results show that Arabic dialects share a substantial common core, while differing systematically in frequent discourse markers, evaluative expressions, and recurrent phraseological patterns. These findings provide empirical evidence for regional clustering among contemporary dialects and for variation relative to the standard register. The study contributes linguistic insights that support both Arabic dialectology and the development of dialect-aware NLP systems.