Samah Ghonem

Author directory

2026

Mitigating factual hallucinations in Large Language Model (LLM) responses is critical, especially when handling sacred Islamic text. This paper presents our system for the IslamicEval 2026 Shared Task-Subtask 1 (Span Detection), which requires extracting exact character-level spans and fragment labeling of religious citations in Arabic LLM-generated responses. We frame this as a supervised token-classification task, fine-tuning a monolingual bidirectional encoder (AraBERTv2). To process long sequences, we implement a sliding window chunking mechanism with an overlapping stride. We reconstruct final character boundaries using a post-processing heuristic that resolves overlapping token predictions. Furthermore, we apply a cascading false-positive filter using cross-type conflict resolution and category-specific minimum length thresholds. Our pipeline yields highly competitive results, achieving a Macro-F1 score of 0.9652 on the development set and a peak evaluation score of 0.9736 on the official-task test set.