Dear colleagues,

You are invited to participate in the *ArAIEval Shared Task *at the *ArabicNLP 2024*:

(i) detection of propagandistic textual spans with persuasion techniques identification (unimodal) on Arabic news articles and tweets.

(ii) distinguishing between propagandistic and non-propagandistic memes (multimodal) in Arabic.

The shared task will be held alongside the Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2024), co-located with the ACL2024 Conference in Bangkok, Thailand (11-16 Aug, 2024).

*Tasks*

Task 1: Unimodal (Text) Propagandistic Technique Detection:

The task is to detect the propaganda techniques used in a text and identify the exact span(s) in which each propaganda technique appears. You will be given text snippets from news paragraphs or tweets (multigenre). This is a sequence tagging task.

Task 2: Multimodal propagandistic memes classification:

We offer the three subtasks as defined below:

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Subtask 2A: Given a text extracted from a meme, detect whether it is propagandistic or not. -

Subtask 2B: Given a meme (text overlayed image), the task is to detect whether the content is propagandistic. -

Subtask 2C: Given multimodal content (text extracted from meme and the meme itself) the task is to detect whether the content is propagandistic.

Website for detailed information: https://araieval.gitlab.io/

Registration and submission:

Task 1: https://codalab.lisn.upsaclay.fr/competitions/18111

Task 2: https://codalab.lisn.upsaclay.fr/competitions/18099

Important Dates

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15 Mar 2024: Registration on CodaLab and the start of the development cycle (release of training and development datasets, along with submission for the development phase on CodaLab) -

27 April 2023 23:59 AOE: Beginning of the evaluation cycle (test sets release) -

1 May 2024 23:59 AOE: End of the evaluation cycle (run submission) -

5 May 2024: Release leaderboard -

15 May 2024: Deadline for the submission of shared task papers -

17 June 2024: Notification of acceptance of shared task papers -

1 July 2024: Deadline for submission of camera-ready papers -

16 August 2023: ArabicNLP Conference (colocated with ACL-2024)

Organizers

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Firoj Alam, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar -

Maram Hasanain, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar -

Reem Suwaileh, HBKU, Qatar -

Md. Arid Hasan, University of New Brunswick, Canada -

Fatema Ahmed, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU, Qatar -

Md. Rafiul Biswas, HBKU, Qatar -

Wajdi Zaghouani, HBKU, Qatar

Regards,

The ArAIEval Shared Task Organizers

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*Wajdi Zaghouani, Ph.D.*

*Associate Professor in Digital Humanities* College of Humanities and Social Sciences

P.O. Box 34110 | Education City | Doha, Qatar tel: +974 4454 5601 | mob: +974 33454992

wzaghouani@hbku.edu.qa| Office A141, LAS Building