AraSentEval 2026: A Shared Task on Sentiment Analysis and Swapping in Arabic
The 7th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT7) with 5 Shared Tasks
Abstract
Sentiment analysis is a fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Standard sentiment classification for the Arabic language remains challenging due to the high volume of dialectal Arabic. To advance research in this area, this paper proposes the Shared Task on Sentiment Analysis and Swapping in Arabic (AraSentEval), organized as part of the OSACT7 Workshop at LREC 2026. This shared task consists of two subtasks: Subtask 1 focuses on multi-class and multi-dialect sentiment analysis, requiring models to identify sentiment polarity across various Arabic dialects. Subtask 2 introduces a generative task for Arabic sentiment swap, challenging models to invert sentiment polarity while preserving core semantics. In this overview paper, we present the motivation, dataset creation, and summarize the main findings from participating models.