Call for Participation: AraSentEval 2026 Shared Task Subject: Call for Participation: AraSentEval 2026 Shared Task on Sentiment Analysis and Swapping in Arabic (Hosted with OSACT7 at LREC 2026) We are delighted to invite you to participate in the AraSentEval 2026 Shared Task, hosted in conjunction with the 7th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT7) at LREC 2026. Overview Sentiment analysis remains a critical application in NLP, yet Arabic presents unique challenges due to its rich morphology and dialectal variations. AraSentEval 2026 aims to push the boundaries of Arabic sentiment analysis by evaluating both understanding (classification) and generation (style transfer) in diverse contexts. Task Description AraSentEval features two complementary subtasks designed to foster innovation in Arabic NLP: Subtask 1: Arabic Dialect Sentiment Analysis A multi-class classification task to identify the sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) of texts written in various Arabic dialects (Moroccan, Egyptian, Jordanian, and Saudi). This subtask focuses on robustness across lexical and syntactic diversity. Subtask 2: Arabic Sentiment Swap A challenging generative task where systems must rewrite an Arabic sentence to invert its sentiment polarity (e.g., positive to negative) while preserving its core meaning. This task requires deep semantic understanding and high-quality generation capabilities. Datasets
* Subtask 1: Multi-Dialect-Sent (MDS-3), a balanced dataset of 3,000 sentences across five major dialects. * Subtask 2: MAAKS, a manually-curated parallel dataset of 5,000 Modern Standard Arabic sentence pairs.
Important Dates (Tentative)
* January 01, 2026: Release of training/dev data and evaluation scripts. * February 10, 2026: Registration deadline and release of test data. * February 17, 2026: End of evaluation cycle (Test set submission closes). * February 24, 2026: Announcement of results. * March 10, 2026: System description paper submissions due. * March 20, 2026: Notification of acceptance. * March 30, 2026: Camera-ready versions due. * May 2026 (TBC): Workshop at LREC 2026.
Participation Participants are welcome to submit to one or both subtasks. The shared task will be managed via CodaLab. For more details, participation guidelines, and data access, please visit our task website: https://ezzini.github.io/AraSentEval/ Organizers
* Saad Ezzini, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, KSA * Paul Rayson, Lancaster University, UK * Shadi Abudalfa, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, KSA * Maram Alharbi, Lancaster University, UK * Mo El-Haj, VinUniversity, Vietnam / Lancaster University, UK * Samaher Alghamdi, Lancaster University, UK * Reem Alotaibi, King Abdulaziz University, KSA * Salmane Chafik, UM6P, Morocco
We look forward to your participation! Best regards, The AraSentEval 2026 Organizers
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