Lara Hassan


2026

Being modeled as a single-label classification task for a long time, recent work has argued that Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI) should be framed as a multi-label classification task. However, ADI remains constrained by the availability of single-label datasets, with no large-scale multi-label resources available for training. By analyzing models trained on single-label ADI data, we show that the main difficulty in repurposing such datasets for Multi-Label Arabic Dialect Identification (MLADI) lies in the selection of negative samples, as many sentences treated as negative could be acceptable in multiple dialects. To address these issues, we construct a multi-label dataset by generating automatic multi-label annotations using GPT-4o and binary dialect acceptability classifiers, with aggregation guided by the Arabic Level of Dialectness (ALDi). Afterward, we train a BERT-based multi-label classifier using curriculum learning strategies aligned with dialectal complexity and label cardinality. On the MLADI leaderboard, our best-performing LahjatBERT model achieves a macro F1 of 0.69, compared to 0.55 for the strongest previously reported system.

2024

The abundance of news sources and the urgent demand for reliable information have led to serious concerns about the threat of misleading information. In this paper, we present FRAPPE, a FRAming, Persuasion, and Propaganda Explorer system. FRAPPE goes beyond conventional news analysis of articles and unveils the intricate linguistic techniques used to shape readers’ opinions and emotions. Our system allows users not only to analyze individual articles for their genre, framings, and use of persuasion techniques, but also to draw comparisons between the strategies of persuasion and framing adopted by a diverse pool of news outlets and countries across multiple languages for different topics, thus providing a comprehensive understanding of how information is presented and manipulated. FRAPPE is publicly accessible at https://frappe.streamlit.app/ and a video explaining our system is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RlTfSVnZmk