Rana Malhas

Author directory

2026

We describe the main findings of the second IslamicEval shared task on hallucination detection in LLM-generated Islam related text (IslamicEval 2026). While the first occurrence of the task in 2025 separately evaluated hallucination detection/correction in quoted Quranic verses and Hadiths alongside a distinct QA retrieval subtask, this year integrates these objectives into four fine-grained subtasks with a much larger provided training set. Given an Islamic question and an LLM response, systems must: 1) detect all cited Quran and Hadith references (including verse numbers and narrators); 2) identify hallucinated citations; 3) correct the hallucinated content; and 4) assess the relevance of every citation to the prompt. Sixteen teams participated in the final phase across the four subtasks, utilizing diverse pipelines that highlight both the challenge of the task and the necessity of mitigation strategies in Islamic AI applications.

2025

Hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge and continues to draw substantial research attention. The problem becomes especially critical when hallucinations arise in sensitive domains, such as religious discourse. To address this gap, we introduce IslamicEval 2025—the first shared task specifically focused on evaluating and detecting hallucinations in Islamic content. The task consists of two subtasks: (1) Hallucination Detection and Correction of quoted verses (Ayahs) from the Holy Quran and quoted Hadiths; and (2) Qur’an and Hadith Question Answering, which assesses retrieval models and LLMs by requiring answers to be retrieved from grounded, authoritative sources. Thirteen teams participated in the final phase of the shared task, employing a range of pipelines and frameworks. Their diverse approaches underscore both the complexity of the task and the importance of effectively managing hallucinations in Islamic discourse.

2023

Motivated by the need for intelligent question answering (QA) systems on the Holy Qur’an and the success of the first Qur’an Question Answering shared task (Qur’an QA 2022 at OSACT 2022), we have organized the second version at ArabicNLP 2023. The Qur’an QA 2023 is composed of two sub-tasks: the passage retrieval (PR) task and the machine reading comprehension (MRC) task. The main aim of the shared task is to encourage state-of-the-art research on Arabic PR and MRC on the Holy Qur’an. Our shared task has attracted 9 teams to submit 22 runs for the PR task, and 6 teams to submit 17 runs for the MRC task. In this paper, we present an overview of the task and provide an outline of the approaches employed by the participating teams in both sub-tasks.

2022

Motivated by the resurgence of the machine reading comprehension (MRC) research, we have organized the first Qur’an Question Answering shared task, “Qur’an QA 2022”. The task in its first year aims to promote state-of-the-art research on Arabic QA in general and MRC in particular on the Holy Qur’an, which constitutes a rich and fertile source of knowledge for Muslim and non-Muslim inquisitors and knowledge-seekers. In this paper, we provide an overview of the shared task that succeeded in attracting 13 teams to participate in the final phase, with a total of 30 submitted runs. Moreover, we outline the main approaches adopted by the participating teams in the context of highlighting some of our perceptions and general trends that characterize the participating systems and their submitted runs.

2016