Sentiment analysis is a fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Standard sentiment classification for the Arabic language remains challenging due to the high volume of dialectal Arabic. To advance research in this area, this paper proposes the Shared Task on Sentiment Analysis and Swapping in Arabic (AraSentEval), organized as part of the OSACT7 Workshop at LREC 2026. This shared task consists of two subtasks: Subtask 1 focuses on multi-class and multi-dialect sentiment analysis, requiring models to identify sentiment polarity across various Arabic dialects. Subtask 2 introduces a generative task for Arabic sentiment swap, challenging models to invert sentiment polarity while preserving core semantics. In this overview paper, we present the motivation, dataset creation, and summarize the main findings from participating models.

Arabic automatic speech recognition (ASR) faces unique challenges due to diglossia, extensive regional dialect variation, and limited systematically balanced speech resources. Existing speech datasets often focus on single dialects or large-scale broadcast/web data, leading to trade-offs between linguistic diversity and annotation quality. We present BULBUL, a multi-dialect Arabic ASR dataset collected from 275 speakers across 11 Arab countries. BULBUL includes structured dialect and sub-dialect coverage, as well as recordings of classical Arabic and modern standard Arabic spoken by participants in their native dialectal accents to support accent-aware modeling. The quality of the recordings was ensured through a two-level human verification process. We further benchmark a range of recent ASR systems, establishing strong baselines for modern dialectal and accented Arabic ASR.

PromptLab is a web-based platform for collaborative prompt engineering across diverse natural language processing tasks and datasets. The platform addresses primary challenges in prompt development, including template creation, collaborative review, and quality assurance through a comprehensive workflow that supports both individual researchers and team-based projects. PromptLab integrates with HuggingFace and provides AI-assisted prompt generation via OpenRouter[https://openrouter.ai/], and supporting real-time validation with multiple Large Language Models (LLMs). The platform features a flexible templating system using Jinja2, role-based project management, peer review processes, and supports programmatic access through RESTful APIs. To ensure data privacy and support sensitive research environments, PromptLab includes an easy CI/CD pipeline for self-hosted deployments and institutional control. We demonstrate the platform’s effectiveness through two evaluations: a controlled comparison study with six researchers across five benchmark datasets and 13 models with 90 prompts; and a comprehensive case study in instruction tuning research, where over 350 prompts across 80+ datasets have been developed and validated by multiple team members. The platform is available at https://promptlab.up.railway.app and the source code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/KFUPM-JRCAI/PromptLab.

StanceEval 2026 is the second edition of the StanceEval shared task series on stance detection in Arabic social media text. Stance detection aims to identify a writer’s stance toward a given topic. Given a tweet and a target, participating systems must determine whether the writer’s stance is Favor, Against, or None. This edition focuses on cross-target generalization across two distinct evaluation tracks: Track 1 evaluates thematically related cross-target transfer (testing on Women Driving, related to Women Empowerment in the training data), while Track 2 evaluates cross-domain transfer to completely unseen targets (E-Cars and Trimester System). The shared task attracted 80 registered teams from 12 countries. During the evaluation phase, 30 unique teams submitted entries, with 21 teams officially ranked in Track 1 and 13 in Track 2 following validation filtering, and 20 teams submitting system-description papers. Participating teams employed diverse methodologies, including fine-tuned pretrained language models, prompt-based and retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs), fine-tuned LLMs, and hybrid cascades. Top systems achieved impressive F_avg2 scores of 0.8994 on Track1 and 0.9400 on Track2, substantially outperforming the strongest baselines (0.7366 and 0.7475, respectively), where F_avg2 denotes the macro-averaged F1 score over the Favor and Against classes. Counterintuitively, performance on the unseen targets was higher than on the related target, a disparity could be driven by extreme target polarization, class imbalance, and dialectal or sarcastic nuance across topics.

We present HalluScoring 2026, a shared task for evaluating hallucination detection and factual verification in Arabic question answering under challenging generalization settings. The shared task is organized into two main tasks, each comprising two subtasks, for a total of four subtasks. Task 1 evaluates binary hallucination detection, considering generalization to unseen questions (Subtask 1.1) and responses generated by unseen LLMs (Subtask 1.2). Task 2 extends the evaluation beyond detection by requiring the systems to additionally identify the correct factual answer from six related candidates, covering Islamic knowledge (Subtask 2.1) and general knowledge (Subtask 2.2). The shared task is based on two Arabic datasets: HalluScore and HalluTruthQA. A total of 13 teams participated in the shared task, 10 of which submitted system description papers. The results of Task 1 demonstrate that hallucination detection remains challenging under distribution shift, with the winning team achieving AUC-ROC test scores of 0.772 and 0.767 for Subtasks 1.1 and 1.2, respectively. For Task 2, the winning team achieved scores of 0.882 and 0.857 in the Islamic and general-knowledge subtasks, respectively, under assisted evaluation.

NADI 2026 is the seventh edition of the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task series and the second dedicated to multidialectal Arabic speech processing. This edition comprises five tasks and eight subtasks spanning Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Spoken Dialect Identification (SDID), Text-to-Speech (TTS), Spoken Language Translation (SLT), and Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). NADI 2026 emphasizes realistic evaluation through low-bandwidth, mixed-dialect, code-switched, out-of-domain, and zero-shot settings, while introducing TTS, SLT, and SLU to the series for the first time. The shared task attracted 21 participating teams from at least 13 countries, with 48 test-phase submissions, and 14 submitted system-description papers. Results show that out-of-domain generalization remain a bottleneck and highlight the effectiveness of recent Arabic-specialized speech models, multimodal dialect identification, and ensemble methods. Overall, NADI 2026 provides a broader and more challenging benchmark for robust Arabic dialect speech processing.

Mainstream large vision-language models (LVLMs) inherently encode cultural biases, highlighting the need for diverse multimodal datasets. To address this gap, we introduce PEARL, a large-scale Arabic multimodal dataset and benchmark explicitly designed for cultural understanding. Constructed through advanced agentic workflows and extensive human-in-the-loop annotations by 37 annotators from across the Arab world, PEARL comprises over 309K multimodal examples spanning ten culturally significant domains covering all Arab countries. We further provide two robust evaluation benchmarks (PEARL and PEARL-LITE) along with a specialized subset (PEARL-X) explicitly developed to assess nuanced cultural variations. Comprehensive evaluations on state-of-the-art open and proprietary LVLMs demonstrate that reasoning-centric instruction alignment substantially improves models’ cultural grounding compared to conventional scaling methods. PEARL establishes a foundational resource for advancing culturally-informed multimodal modeling research. All datasets and benchmarks are publicly available.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in reasoning abilities and general natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet their performance on Arabic data, characterized by rich morphology, diverse dialects, and complex script, remains underexplored. This paper presents a comprehensive benchmarking study of multiple reasoning-focused LLMs, with a special emphasis on the newly introduced DeepSeek models, across a suite of fifteen Arabic NLP tasks. We experiment with various strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning. This allows us to systematically evaluate performance on datasets covering a range of applications to examine their capacity for linguistic reasoning under different levels of complexity. Our experiments reveal several key findings. First, carefully selecting just three in-context examples delivers an average uplift of over 13 F1 points on classification tasks—boosting sentiment analysis from 35.3% to 87.5% and paraphrase detection from 56.1% to 87.0%. Second, reasoning-focused DeepSeek architectures outperform a strong GPT o4-mini baseline by an average of 12 F1 points on complex inference tasks in the zero-shot setting. Third, LoRA-based fine-tuning yields up to an additional 8 points in F1 and BLEU compared to equivalent increases in model scale. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AraReasoner41299

We present an overview of the AraGenEval shared task, organized as part of the ArabicNLP 2025 conference. This task introduced the first benchmark suite for Arabic authorship analysis, featuring three subtasks: Authorship Style Transfer, Authorship Identification, and AI-Generated Text Detection. We curated high-quality datasets, including over 47,000 paragraphs from 21 authors and a balanced corpus of human- and AI-generated texts. The task attracted significant global participation, with 72 registered teams from 16 countries. The results highlight the effectiveness of transformer-based models, with top systems leveraging prompt engineering for style transfer, model ensembling for authorship identification, and a mix of multilingual and Arabic-specific models for AI text detection. This paper details the task design, datasets, participant systems, and key findings, establishing a foundation for future research in Arabic stylistics and trustworthy NLP.

Recently, extensive research on the hallucination of the large language models (LLMs) has mainly focused on the English language. Despite the growing number of multilingual and Arabic-specific LLMs, evaluating LLMs’ hallucination in the Arabic context remains relatively underexplored. The knowledge gap is particularly pressing given Arabic’s widespread use across many regions and its importance in global communication and media. This paper presents the first comprehensive hallucination evaluation of Arabic and multilingual LLMs on two critical Arabic natural language generation tasks: generative question answering (GQA) and summarization. This study evaluates a total of 12 LLMs, including 4 Arabic pre-trained models, 4 multilingual models, and 4 reasoning-based models. To assess the factual consistency and faithfulness of LLMs’ outputs, we developed a fine-grained hallucination evaluation framework consisting of 12 fine-grained hallucination indicators that represent the varying characteristics of each task. The results reveal that factual hallucinations are more prevalent than faithfulness errors across all models and tasks. Notably, the Arabic pre-trained model Allam consistently demonstrates lower hallucination rates than multilingual models and a comparative performance with reasoning-based models. The code is available at: https://github.com/aishaalansari57/AraHalluEval

Recently, there has been a growing interest in analyzing user-generated text to understand opinions expressed on social media. In NLP, this task is known as stance detection, where the goal is to predict whether the writer is in favor, against, or has no opinion on a given topic. Stance detection is crucial for applications such as sentiment analysis, opinion mining, and social media monitoring, as it helps in capturing the nuanced perspectives of users on various subjects. As part of the ArabicNLP 2024 program, we organized the first shared task on Arabic Stance Detection, StanceEval 2024. This initiative aimed to foster advancements in stance detection for the Arabic language, a relatively underrepresented area in Arabic NLP research. This overview paper provides a detailed description of the shared task, covering the dataset, the methodologies used by various teams, and a summary of the results from all participants. We received 28 unique team registrations, and during the testing phase, 16 teams submitted valid entries. The highest classification F-score obtained was 84.38.