This research introduces DARES, a dataset for assessing the readability of Arabic text in Saudi school materials. DARES compromise of 13335 instances from textbooks used in 2021 and contains two subtasks; (a) Coarse-grained readability assessment where the text is classified into different educational levels such as primary and secondary. (b) Fine-grained readability assessment where the text is classified into individual grades.. We fine-tuned five transformer models that support Arabic and found that CAMeLBERTmix performed the best in all input settings. Evaluation results showed high performance for the coarse-grained readability assessment task, achieving a weighted F1 score of 0.91 and a macro F1 score of 0.79. The fine-grained task achieved a weighted F1 score of 0.68 and a macro F1 score of 0.55. These findings demonstrate the potential of our approach for advancing Arabic text readability assessment in education, with implications for future innovations in the field.

The expanding financial markets of the Arab world require sophisticated Arabic NLP tools. To address this need within the banking domain, the Arabic Financial NLP (AraFinNLP) shared task proposes two subtasks: (i) Multi-dialect Intent Detection and (ii) Cross-dialect Translation and Intent Preservation. This shared task uses the updated ArBanking77 dataset, which includes about 39k parallel queries in MSA and four dialects. Each query is labeled with one or more of a common 77 intents in the banking domain. These resources aim to foster the development of robust financial Arabic NLP, particularly in the areas of machine translation and banking chat-bots.A total of 45 unique teams registered for this shared task, with 11 of them actively participated in the test phase. Specifically, 11 teams participated in Subtask 1, while only 1 team participated in Subtask 2. The winning team of Subtask 1 achieved F1 score of 0.8773, and the only team submitted in Subtask 2 achieved a 1.667 BLEU score.