Diverging from the trend of the previous rumor verification studies, we introduce the new task of rumor verification using evidence that are exclusively captured from authorities, i.e., entities holding the right and knowledge to verify corresponding information. To enable research on this task for Arabic low-resourced language, we construct and release the first Authority-Rumor-Evidence Dataset (AuRED). The dataset comprises 160 rumors expressed in tweets and 692 Twitter timelines of authorities containing about 34k tweets. Additionally, we explore how existing evidence retrieval and claim verification models for fact-checking perform on our task under both the cross-lingual zero-shot and in-domain fine-tuning setups. Our experiments show that although evidence retrieval models perform relatively well on the task establishing strong baselines, there is still a big room for improvement. However, existing claim verification models perform poorly on the task no matter how good the retrieval performance is. The results also show that stance detection can be useful for evidence retrieval. Moreover, existing fact-checking datasets showed a potential in transfer learning to our task, however, further investigation using different datasets and setups is required.

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has emerged as a significant research problem within natural language processing, providing valuable support for educators in assessing student writing skills. In this paper, we introduce QAES, the first publicly available trait-specific annotations for Arabic AES, built on the Qatari Corpus of Argumentative Writing (QCAW). QAES includes a diverse collection of essays in Arabic, each of them annotated with holistic and trait-specific scores, including relevance, organization, vocabulary, style, development, mechanics, and grammar. In total, it comprises 195 Arabic essays (with lengths ranging from 239 to 806 words) across two distinct argumentative writing tasks. We benchmark our dataset against the state-of-the-art English baselines and a feature-based approach. In addition, we discuss the adopted guidelines and the challenges encountered during the annotation process. Finally, we provide insights into potential areas for improvement and future directions in Arabic AES research.

This paper presents an overview of the Arabic Natural Language Understanding (ArabicNLU 2024) shared task, focusing on two subtasks: Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) and Location Mention Disambiguation (LMD). The task aimed to evaluate the ability of automated systems to resolve word ambiguity and identify locations mentioned in Arabic text. We provided participants with novel datasets, including a sense-annotated corpus for WSD, called SALMA with approximately 34k annotated tokens, and the dataset with 3,893 annotations and 763 unique location mentions. These are challenging tasks. Out of the 38 registered teams, only three teams participated in the final evaluation phase, with the highest accuracy being 77.8% for WSD and 95.0% for LMD. The shared task not only facilitated the evaluation and comparison of different techniques, but also provided valuable insights and resources for the continued advancement of Arabic NLU technologies.

Although several methods were proposed to address the problem of automated essay scoring (AES) in the last 50 years, there is still much to desire in terms of effectiveness. Large Language Models (LLMs) are transformer-based models that demonstrate extraordinary capabilities on various tasks. In this paper, we test the ability of LLMs, given their powerful linguistic knowledge, to analyze and effectively score written essays. We experimented with two popular LLMs, namely ChatGPT and Llama. We aim to check if these models can do this task and, if so, how their performance is positioned among the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models across two levels, holistically and per individual writing trait. We utilized prompt-engineering tactics in designing four different prompts to bring their maximum potential on this task. Our experiments conducted on the ASAP dataset revealed several interesting observations. First, choosing the right prompt depends highly on the model and nature of the task. Second, the two LLMs exhibited comparable average performance in AES, with a slight advantage for ChatGPT. Finally, despite the performance gap between the two LLMs and SOTA models in terms of predictions, they provide feedback to enhance the quality of the essays, which can potentially help both teachers and students.

Extracting geolocation information from social media data enables effective disaster management, as it helps response authorities; for example, in locating incidents for planning rescue activities, and affected people for evacuation. Nevertheless, geolocation extraction is greatly understudied for the low resource languages such as Arabic. To fill this gap, we introduce IDRISI-RA, the first publicly-available Arabic Location Mention Recognition (LMR) dataset that provides human- and automatically-labeled versions in order of thousands and millions of tweets, respectively. It contains both location mentions and their types (e.g., district, city). Our extensive analysis shows the decent geographical, domain, location granularity, temporal, and dialectical coverage of IDRISI-RA. Furthermore, we establish baselines using the standard Arabic NER models and build two simple, yet effective, LMR models. Our rigorous experiments confirm the need for developing specific models for Arabic LMR in the disaster domain. Moreover, experiments show the promising domain and geographical generalizability of IDRISI-RA under zero-shot learning.

Extracting and disambiguating geolocation information from social media data enables effective disaster management, as it helps response authorities; for example, locating incidents for planning rescue activities and affected people for evacuation. Nevertheless, the dearth of resources and tools hinders the development and evaluation of Location Mention Disambiguation (LMD) models in the disaster management domain. Consequently, the LMD task is greatly understudied, especially for the low resource languages such as Arabic. To fill this gap, we introduce IDRISI-D, the largest to date English and the first Arabic public LMD datasets. Additionally, we introduce a modified hierarchical evaluation framework that offers a lenient and nuanced evaluation of LMD systems. We further benchmark IDRISI-D datasets using representative baselines and show the competitiveness of BERT-based models.

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.

The spread of misinformation has become a major concern to our society, and social media is one of its main culprits. Evidently, health misinformation related to vaccinations has slowed down global efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Studies have shown that fake news spreads substantially faster than real news on social media networks. One way to limit this fast dissemination is by assessing information sources in a semi-automatic way. To this end, we aim to identify users who are prone to spread fake news in Arabic Twitter. Such users play an important role in spreading misinformation and identifying them has the potential to control the spread. We construct an Arabic dataset on Twitter users, which consists of 1,546 users, of which 541 are prone to spread fake news (based on our definition). We use features extracted from users’ recent tweets, e.g., linguistic, statistical, and profile features, to predict whether they are prone to spread fake news or not. To tackle the classification task, multiple learning models are employed and evaluated. Empirical results reveal promising detection performance, where an F1 score of 0.73 was achieved by the logistic regression model. Moreover, when tested on a benchmark English dataset, our approach has outperformed the current state-of-the-art for this task.

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.

In this paper we introduce ArCOV19-Rumors, an Arabic COVID-19 Twitter dataset for misinformation detection composed of tweets containing claims from 27th January till the end of April 2020. We collected 138 verified claims, mostly from popular fact-checking websites, and identified 9.4K relevant tweets to those claims. Tweets were manually-annotated by veracity to support research on misinformation detection, which is one of the major problems faced during a pandemic. ArCOV19-Rumors supports two levels of misinformation detection over Twitter: verifying free-text claims (called claim-level verification) and verifying claims expressed in tweets (called tweet-level verification). Our dataset covers, in addition to health, claims related to other topical categories that were influenced by COVID-19, namely, social, politics, sports, entertainment, and religious. Moreover, we present benchmarking results for tweet-level verification on the dataset. We experimented with SOTA models of versatile approaches that either exploit content, user profiles features, temporal features and propagation structure of the conversational threads for tweet verification.

In this paper, we present ArCOV-19, an Arabic COVID-19 Twitter dataset that spans one year, covering the period from 27th of January 2020 till 31st of January 2021. ArCOV-19 is the first publicly-available Arabic Twitter dataset covering COVID-19 pandemic that includes about 2.7M tweets alongside the propagation networks of the most-popular subset of them (i.e., most-retweeted and -liked). The propagation networks include both retweetsand conversational threads (i.e., threads of replies). ArCOV-19 is designed to enable research under several domains including natural language processing, information retrieval, and social computing. Preliminary analysis shows that ArCOV-19 captures rising discussions associated with the first reported cases of the disease as they appeared in the Arab world. In addition to the source tweets and the propagation networks, we also release the search queries and the language-independent crawler used to collect the tweets to encourage the curation of similar datasets.

We introduce AraFacts, the first large Arabic dataset of naturally occurring claims collected from 5 Arabic fact-checking websites, e.g., Fatabyyano and Misbar, and covering claims since 2016. Our dataset consists of 6,121 claims along with their factual labels and additional metadata, such as fact-checking article content, topical category, and links to posts or Web pages spreading the claim. Since the data is obtained from various fact-checking websites, we standardize the original claim labels to provide a unified label rating for all claims. Moreover, we provide revealing dataset statistics and motivate its use by suggesting possible research applications. The dataset is made publicly available for the research community.

This paper provides an overview of the offensive language detection shared task at the 4th workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT4). There were two subtasks, namely: Subtask A, involving the detection of offensive language, which contains unacceptable or vulgar content in addition to any kind of explicit or implicit insults or attacks against individuals or groups; and Subtask B, involving the detection of hate speech, which contains insults or threats targeting a group based on their nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, political or sport affiliation, religious belief, or other common characteristics. In total, 40 teams signed up to participate in Subtask A, and 14 of them submitted test runs. For Subtask B, 33 teams signed up to participate and 13 of them submitted runs. We present and analyze all submissions in this paper.

As the use of social media platforms increases extensively to freely communicate and share opinions, hate speech becomes an outstanding problem that requires urgent attention. This paper focuses on the problem of detecting hate speech in Arabic tweets. To tackle the problem efficiently, we adopt a “quick and simple” approach by which we investigate the effectiveness of 15 classical (e.g., SVM) and neural (e.g., CNN) learning models, while exploring two different term representations. Our experiments on 8k labelled dataset show that the best neural learning models outperform the classical ones, while distributed term representation is more effective than statistical bag-of-words representation. Overall, our best classifier (that combines both CNN and RNN in a joint architecture) achieved 0.73 macro-F1 score on the dev set, which significantly outperforms the majority-class baseline that achieves 0.49, proving the effectiveness of our “quick and simple” approach.

The widespread usage of Twitter during emergencies has provided a new opportunity and timely resource to crisis responders for various disaster management tasks. Geolocation information of pertinent tweets is crucial for gaining situational awareness and delivering aid. However, the majority of tweets do not come with geoinformation. In this work, we focus on the task of location mention recognition from crisis-related tweets. Specifically, we investigate the influence of different types of labeled training data on the performance of a BERT-based classification model. We explore several training settings such as combing in- and out-domain data from news articles and general-purpose and crisis-related tweets. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of geospatial proximity while training on near or far-away events from the target event. Using five different datasets, our extensive experiments provide answers to several critical research questions that are useful for the research community to foster research in this important direction. For example, results show that, for training a location mention recognition model, Twitter-based data is preferred over general-purpose data; and crisis-related data is preferred over general-purpose Twitter data. Furthermore, training on data from geographically-nearby disaster events to the target event boosts the performance compared to training on distant events.

This paper presents the participation of Qatar University team in MADAR shared task, which addresses the problem of sentence-level fine-grained Arabic Dialect Identification over 25 different Arabic dialects in addition to the Modern Standard Arabic. Arabic Dialect Identification is not a trivial task since different dialects share some features, e.g., utilizing the same character set and some vocabularies. We opted to adopt a very simple approach in terms of extracted features and classification models; we only utilize word and character n-grams as features, and Na ̈ıve Bayes models as classifiers. Surprisingly, the simple approach achieved non-na ̈ıve performance. The official results, reported on a held-out testing set, show that the dialect of a given sentence can be identified at an accuracy of 64.58% by our best submitted run.

In this paper we describe our QU-BIGIR system for the Arabic subtask D of the SemEval 2017 Task 3. Our approach builds on our participation in the past version of the same subtask. This year, our system uses different similarity measures that encodes lexical and semantic pairwise similarity of text pairs. In addition to well known similarity measures such as cosine similarity, we use other measures based on the summary statistics of word embedding representation for a given text. To rank a list of candidate question answer pairs for a given question, we learn a linear SVM classifier over our similarity features. Our best resulting run came second in subtask D with a very competitive performance to the first-ranking system.