Lara Hassan
2026
Curriculum Learning and Pseudo-Labeling Improve the Generalization of Multi-Label Arabic Dialect Identification Models
Ali Mekky | Mohamed El Zeftawy | Lara Hassan | Amr Keleg | Preslav Nakov
Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects
Ali Mekky | Mohamed El Zeftawy | Lara Hassan | Amr Keleg | Preslav Nakov
Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects
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
FRAPPE: FRAming, Persuasion, and Propaganda Explorer
Ahmed Sajwani | Alaa El Setohy | Ali Mekky | Diana Turmakhan | Lara Hassan | Mohamed El Zeftawy | Omar El Herraoui | Osama Mohammed Afzal | Qisheng Liao | Tarek Mahmoud | Zain Muhammad Mujahid | Muhammad Umar Salman | Muhammad Arslan Manzoor | Massa Baali | Jakub Piskorski | Nicolas Stefanovitch | Giovanni Da San Martino | Preslav Nakov
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Ahmed Sajwani | Alaa El Setohy | Ali Mekky | Diana Turmakhan | Lara Hassan | Mohamed El Zeftawy | Omar El Herraoui | Osama Mohammed Afzal | Qisheng Liao | Tarek Mahmoud | Zain Muhammad Mujahid | Muhammad Umar Salman | Muhammad Arslan Manzoor | Massa Baali | Jakub Piskorski | Nicolas Stefanovitch | Giovanni Da San Martino | Preslav Nakov
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
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