EGCSS at StanceNakba Shared Task: Cross-Topic Arabic Stance Detection for Two Middle East Issues
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Nakba Narratives as Language Resources @ LREC 2026
Abstract
Stance detection continues to be an important task sitting at the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computational Social Science (CSS). In this work, we evaluate how different variations of BERT models perform on the cross-topic form of the task. In particular, we inspect their performance on the second subtask of the shared task StanceNakba 2026, where two topics are included, namely Arab Normalization with Israel and The Presence of Refugees in Arab Countries. We find that the best-performing model was bert-base-arabertv02-twitter, and we further improve its performance by providing context about the topic during the training phase, achieving an F1-score of 0.86 and ranking second among the participating teams.