This study presents an analysis of digital polarization on the topic of the Hijab by examining YouTube comments in Arabic. Employing a novel dataset of around 10K annotated comments, this research investigates the digital discourse using seven labels: Stance, Use of Sarcasm, Argumentation, Cordiality, Offensiveness, Hopefulness, and Apparent Gender of Commenters. The findings reveal significant insights into gender dynamics and the prevalence of specific rhetorical strategies within the debate. This study contributes to the broader field of polarization and argument mining, offering a unique lens on the intersection of digital culture and societal issues in the Arab context.

In this study, we present the first large dataset, ThatiAR, for subjectivity detection in Arabic, consisting of ~3.6K manually annotated sentences, and GPT-4o based explanations. In addition, we include instructions (both in English and Arabic) to facilitate LLM based fine-tuning. We provide an in-depth analysis of the dataset, annotation process, and extensive benchmark results, including PLMs and LLMs. Our analysis of the annotation process highlights that annotators were strongly influenced by their political, cultural, and religious backgrounds, especially at the beginning of the annotation process. The experimental results suggest that LLMs with in-context learning provide better performance. We release the dataset and resources to the community.

This paper introduces a cross-domain and multi-dialectal stance corpus for Arabic that includes four regions in the Arab World and covers the main Arabic dialect groups. Our corpus consists of 4657 sentences manually annotated with each sentence’s stance towards a specific topic. For each region, we collected sentences related to two controversial topics. We annotated each sentence by at least two annotators to indicate if its stance favors the topic, is against it, or is neutral. Our corpus is well-balanced concerning dialect and stance. Approximately half of the sentences are in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) for each region, and the other half is in the region’s respective dialect. We conducted several machine-learning experiments for stance detection using our new corpus. Our most successful model is the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), using Unigram or TF-IDF extracted features, which yielded an F1-score of 0.66 and an accuracy score of 0.66. Compared with the most similar state-of-the-art dataset, our dataset outperformed in specific stance classes, particularly “neutral” and “against”.

This paper presents the creation of the Qatari Corpus of Argumentative Writing (QCAW) as an annotated L1 Arabic and L2 English bilingual writer corpus. It comprises 200,000 tokens of argumentative writing by Qatari university students in L1 Arabic and L2 English. The corpus includes 195 essays written by 195 students, 159 females and 36 males. The students were native Arabic speakers proficient in English as a second language. The corpus is divided into Arabic and English sections, accompanied by part-of-speech annotated files. The Metadata contains information about the students (gender, major, first and second languages) and the essays (text serial numbers, word limits, genre, writing date, time spent, and location). The paper outlines the steps for collecting and analysing the corpus, including details on essay writers, topic selection, pre-analysis text modifications, proficiency level, gender, and major ratings. Statistical analyses were applied to examine the corpus. The QCAW offers a valuable bilingual data source authored by the same students in Arabic and English, with implications for further research

Social media enables widespread propagation of hate speech targeting groups based on ethnicity, religion, or other characteristics. With manual content moderation being infeasible given the volume, automatic hate speech detection is essential. This paper analyzes 70,000 Arabic tweets, from which 15,965 tweets were selected and annotated, to identify hate speech patterns and train classification models. Annotators labeled the Arabic tweets for offensive content, hate speech, emotion intensity and type, effect on readers, humor, factuality, and spam. Key findings reveal 15% of tweets contain offensive language while 6% have hate speech, mostly targeted towards groups with common ideological or political affiliations. Annotations capture diverse emotions, and sarcasm is more prevalent than humor. Additionally, 10% of tweets provide verifiable factual claims, and 7% are deemed important. For hate speech detection, deep learning models like AraBERT outperform classical machine learning approaches. By providing insights into hate speech characteristics, this work enables improved content moderation and reduced exposure to online hate. The annotated dataset advances Arabic natural language processing research and resources.

Diversification of fonts in video captions based on the voice characteristics, namely loudness, speed and pauses, can affect the viewer receiving the content. This study evaluates a new method, WaveFont, which visualizes the voice characteristics for captions in an intuitive way. The study was specifically designed to test captions, which aims to add a new experience for Arabic viewers. The results indicate that our visualization is comprehensible and acceptable and provides significant added value-for hearing-impaired and non-hearing impaired participants: Significantly more participants stated that WaveFont improves their watching experience more than standard captions.

Identifying irony in user-generated social media content has a wide range of applications; however to date Arabic content has received limited attention. To bridge this gap, this study builds a new open domain Arabic corpus annotated for irony detection. We query Twitter using irony-related hashtags to collect ironic messages, which are then manually annotated by two linguists according to our working definition of irony. Challenges which we have encountered during the annotation process reflect the inherent limitations of Twitter messages interpretation, as well as the complexity of Arabic and its dialects. Once published, our corpus will be a valuable free resource for developing open domain systems for automatic irony recognition in Arabic language and its dialects in social media text.

Abstract The rise of social media empowers people to interact and communicate with anyone anywhere in the world. The possibility of being anonymous avoids censorship and enables freedom of expression. Nevertheless, this anonymity might lead to cybersecurity issues, such as opinion spam, sexual harassment, incitement to hatred or even terrorism propaganda. In such cases, there is a need to know more about the anonymous users and this could be useful in several domains beyond security and forensics such as marketing, for example. In this paper, we focus on a fine-grained analysis of language varieties while considering also the authors’ demographics. We present a Low-Dimensionality Statistical Embedding method to represent text documents. We compared the performance of this method with the best performing teams in the Author Profiling task at PAN 2017. We obtained an average accuracy of 92.08% versus 91.84% for the best performing team at PAN 2017. We also analyse the relationship of the language variety identification with the authors’ gender. Furthermore, we applied our proposed method to a more fine-grained annotated corpus of Arabic varieties covering 22 Arab countries and obtained an overall accuracy of 88.89%. We have also investigated the effect of the authors’ age and gender on the identification of the different Arabic varieties, as well as the effect of the corpus size on the performance of our method.

In the framework of the QNRF project on Arabic Author Profiling for Cyber-Security, we addressed deception detection in Arabic in order to discard those messages that do not really represent potential threats. We have applied the Low Dimensionality Statistical Embedding (LDSE) method to several corpora for Arabic including the Arabic credibility corpus and two new corpora that we created: the Qatar Twitter corpus and the Qatar News corpus. We achieved a performance of 0.797 Macro F-measure on the Arabic Credibility corpus. The obtained results with two well-known distributed representations, namely Continuous Bag of Words and Skip Grams, showed the competitiveness of our approach. The LDSE approach gave similar results on the two corpora that we created. We evaluated our work in a cross-genre scenario, showing the robustness of LDSE when there are enough data about similar topics.

Named entity recognition has served many natural language processing tasks such as information retrieval, machine translation, and question answering systems. Many researchers have addressed the name identification issue in a variety of languages and recently some research efforts have started to focus on named entity recognition for the Arabic language. We present a working Arabic information extraction (IE) system that is used to analyze large volumes of news texts every day to extract the named entity (NE) types person, organization, location, date, and number, as well as quotations (direct reported speech) by and about people. The named entity recognition (NER) system was not developed for Arabic, but instead a multilingual NER system was adapted to also cover Arabic. The Semitic language Arabic substantially differs from the Indo-European and Finno-Ugric languages currently covered. This article thus describes what Arabic language-specific resources had to be developed and what changes needed to be made to the rule set in order to be applicable to the Arabic language. The achieved evaluation results are generally satisfactory, but could be improved for certain entity types.