China

We present the results and findings of the BAREC Shared Task 2025 on Arabic Readability Assessment, organized as part of the Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2025). The BAREC 2025 shared task focuses on automatic readability assessment using the BAREC Corpus, addressing fine-grained classification into 19 readability levels. The shared task includes two sub-tasks: sentence-level classification and document-level classification, and three tracks: (1) Strict Track, where only the BAREC Corpus is allowed; (2) Constrained Track, restricted to the BAREC Corpus, SAMER Corpus, and SAMER Lexicon, and (3) Open Track, allowing any external resources. A total of 22 teams from 12 countries registered for the task. Among these, 17 teams submitted system description papers. The winning team achieved 87.5 QWK on the sentencelevel task and 87.4 QWK on the document-level task.

EMNLP 2025

BAREC Shared Task 2025 on Arabic Readability Assessment

workshop paper

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community."<br>

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

[**Link to Conference Handbook**](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1johU5QqVVYO4RfH7QcIORr7qrVBdzdwC/view?usp=sharing)





<br>

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

We present ImageEval 2025, the first shared task dedicated to Arabic image captioning. The task addresses the critical gap in multimodal Arabic NLP by focusing on two complementary subtasks: (1) creating the first open-source, manually-captioned Arabic image dataset through a collaborative datathon, and (2) developing and evaluating Arabic image captioning models. A total of 44 teams registered, of which eight submitted during the test phase, producing 111 valid submissions. Evaluation was conducted using automatic metrics, LLM-based judgment, and human assessment. In Subtask 1, the best-performing system achieved a cosine similarity of 65.5, while in Subtask 2, the top score was 60.0. Although these results show encouraging progress, they also confirm that Arabic image captioning remains a challenging task, particularly due to cultural grounding requirements, morphological richness, and dialectal variation. All datasets, baseline models, and evaluation tools are released publicly to support future research in Arabic multimodal NLP.

ImageEval 2025: The First Arabic Image Captioning Shared Task

Hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge and continues to draw substantial research attention. The problem becomes especially critical when hallucinations arise in sensitive domains, such as religious discourse. To address this gap, we introduce IslamicEval 2025—the first shared task specifically focused on evaluating and detecting hallucinations in Islamic content. The task consists of two subtasks: (1) Hallucination Detection and Correction of quoted verses (Ayahs) from the Holy Quran and quoted Hadiths; and (2) Qur'an and Hadith Question Answering, which assesses retrieval models and LLMs by requiring answers to be retrieved from grounded, authoritative sources. Thirteen teams participated in the final phase of the shared task, employing a range of pipelines and frameworks. Their diverse approaches underscore both the complexity of the task and the importance of effectively managing hallucinations in Islamic discourse.

IslamicEval 2025: The First Shared Task of Capturing LLMs Hallucination in Islamic Content

We tackle Diacritic Restoration for Arabic dialectal sentences using a multimodal model that combines text and speech. The text stream uses our own pretrained model named CATT, and the speech stream uses the Whisper-base encoder, with a Linear classification head for token-level prediction. We integrate the modalities via either Early Fusion or Cross-Attention Fusion, and the system remains robust when speech is absent. 
Across both official development and test sets, the model outperforms baseline and other participants in WER/CER and maintains an advantage on challenging pronunciations.

NADI 2025: The First Multidialectal Arabic Speech Processing Shared Task

Large Language Models (LLMs) inherently reflect the vast data distributions they encounter during their pre-training phase. As this data is predominantly sourced from the web, there is a high chance it will be skewed towards high-resourced languages and cultures, such as those of the West. Consequently, LLMs often exhibit a diminished understanding of certain communities, a gap that is particularly evident in their knowledge of Arabic and Islamic cultures. This issue becomes even more pronounced with increasingly under-represented topics. To address this critical challenge, we introduce PalmX 2025, the first shared task designed to benchmark the cultural competence of LLMs in these specific domains. The task is composed of two subtasks featuring multiple-choice questions (MCQs) in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA): General Arabic Culture and General Islamic Culture. These subtasks cover a wide range of topics, including traditions, food, history, religious practices, and language expressions from across 22 Arab countries. The initiative drew considerable interest, with 26 teams registering for Subtask 1 and 19 for Subtask 2, culminating in nine and six valid submissions, respectively. Our findings reveal that task-specific fine-tuning substantially boosts performance over baseline models. The top-performing systems achieved an accuracy of 72.15% on cultural questions and 84.22% on Islamic knowledge. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning emerged as the predominant and most effective approach among participants, while the utility of data augmentation was found to be domain-dependent.

PalmX 2025: The First Shared Task on Benchmarking LLMs on Arabic and Islamic Culture

This paper provides a comprehensive overview
of the QIAS 2025 shared task, organized as
part of the ArabicNLP 2025 conference and
co­located with EMNLP 2025. The task was
designed for the evaluation of large language
models in the complex domains of religious and
legal reasoning. It comprises two subtasks: (1)
Islamic Inheritance Reasoning, requiring models to compute inheritance shares according to
Islamic jurisprudence, and (2) Islamic Knowledge Assessment, which covers a range of traditional Islamic disciplines. Both subtasks were
structured as multiple­choice question answering challenges, with questions stratified by varying difficulty levels. The shared task attracted
significant interest, with 44 teams participating in the development phase, from which 18
teams advanced to the final test phase. Of these,
6 teams submitted entries for both subtasks, 8
for Task 1 only, and two for Task 2 only. Ultimately, 16 teams submitted system description
papers. Herein, we detail the task’s motivation,
dataset construction, evaluation protocol, and
present a summary of the participating systems
and their results.

QIAS 2025: Overview of the Shared Task on Islamic Inheritance Reasoning and Knowledge Assessment

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has emerged as a significant research problem in natural language processing, offering valuable tools to support educators in assessing student writing. Motivated by the growing need for reliable Arabic AES systems, we organized the first shared Task for Arabic Quality Evaluation of Essays in Multi-dimensions (TAQEEM) held at the ArabicNLP 2025 conference. TAQEEM 2025 includes two subtasks: Task A on holistic scoring and Task B on trait-specific scoring. It introduces a new (and first of its kind) dataset of 1,265 Arabic essays, annotated with holistic and trait-specific scores, including relevance, organization, vocabulary, style, development, mechanics, and grammar. The main goal of TAQEEM is to address the scarcity of standardized benchmarks and high-quality resources in Arabic AES. TAQEEM 2025 attracted 11 registered teams for Task A and 10 for Task B, with a total of 5 teams, across both tasks, submitting system runs for evaluation. This paper presents an overview of the task, outlines the approaches employed, and discusses the results of the participating teams.


TAQEEM 2025: Overview of The First Shared Task for Arabic Quality Evaluation of Essays in Multi-dimensions

Navigating the complexities of Arabic read ability prediction requires addressing the language’s rich morphology and structural diversity. In the BAREC Shared Task 2025, we participated in all tracks using a stacked ensemble meta learning framework. Our approach combined seven fine-tuned transformer, whose outputs fed into a meta classifier trained on multiple features, including individual predictions, their average, and the average top prediction probabilities. On the blind test set, our ensemble achieved a Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) of 86.4%, demonstrating the effectiveness of integrating diverse transformer encoders for fine grained Arabic readability classification and the potential of meta learning in morphologically rich contexts.

AMAR at BAREC Shared Task 2025: Arabic Meta-learner for Assessing Readability

This work presents a hybrid approach to Arabic sentence-level readability assessment for the BAREC 2025 Shared Task (Strict Track). Building on transformer-based architectures, I integrate 51 handcrafted linguistic features 0 covering morphological, syntactic, lexical, and conceptual dimensions- into a hybrid model that combines transformer contextual embeddings with dense feature representations.
The best-performing model, MARBERT, achieved a Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) of 80.95% on the test set and 83.1% on the blind leaderboard, highlighting the potential of combining linguistic indicators with deep contextual features for fine-grained readability classification across 19 levels.

Noor at BAREC Shared Task 2025: A Hybrid Transformer-Feature Architecture for Sentence-level Readability Assessment

We present a visual-language approach to Arabic readability assessment using the PIXEL Vision Transformer, which processes rendered text as images to bypass tokenization challenges. Our system participated in the BAREC 2025 Shared Task (Sentence-level Strict track). We evaluate orthographic variants (normalization, diacritization, transliteration) and morphological segmentation with different visual boundary markers. Results show that diacritization provides useful visual cues for disambiguation, morphological segmentation improves over word-level processing, and transliterated scripts outperform native Arabic script. Our approach demonstrates the potential of visual processing for readability assessment in complex languages and writing systems.

Pixels at BAREC Shared Task 2025: Visual Arabic Readability Assessment

We presents HUMAIN’s submission to the IslamicEval 2025 Shared Task 1, addressing hallucination detection and correction in Quranic and Hadith LLM-generated content. Our three-stage pipeline covers: (1) Span Detection via sequence-to-sequence annotation using TANL-style markup, (2) Validation with retrieval-based similarity and substring matching against reference corpora, and (3) Correction through exact matching, LCS alignment, and semantic re-ranking. This work presents a multi-stage LLM-based pipeline for Islamic content verification.

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ImageEval 2025: The First Arabic Image Captioning Shared Task

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