Morocco

Arabic Named Entity Recognition (ANER) presents challenges due to its linguistic characteristics (Qu et al., 2023). While Transformer models have advanced ANER, evaluation still relies heavily on aggregate metrics like F1 score that obscure the interplay between data characteristics, model behaviour, and error patterns. We present DeformAR, a diagnostic visual analytics framework for evaluating and diagnosing Arabic NER systems through structured, component-level analysis and interpretability. DeformAR integrates quantitative metrics with interactive visualizations to support systematic error analysis, dataset and model debugging. A key contribution is span-level error categorization—implemented by extending seqeval—enabling diagnosis of boundary, exclusion, and type errors that aggregate scores conceal. In a case study on ANERCorp, DeformAR identifies annotation mistakes, model calibration issues, and subcomponent interaction effects. To our knowledge, this is the first open-source framework for component-level diagnostic evaluation and interpretability in Arabic NER.

EACL 2026

DeformAR: A Visual Analytics Framework for Evaluation of Arabic Named Entity Recognition

diagnostic evaluation

arabic named entity recognition

visual analytics

error analysis

workshop paper

#### *Message from the General Chair, Aline Villavicencio*
I’m delighted and honoured to welcome you to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2026), taking place in the beautiful city of Rabat, in Morocco, in March 24-29, 2026. EACL is the flagship European conference of the Association and EACL 2026 proudly continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity. I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers whose dedication, generosity, and tireless efforts have made this conference possible.
For the first time EACL is being hosted in the African continent. This is an important milestone for our community, and we are grateful to our Moroccan hosts for enabling this historic moment by bringing this edition of EACL to Rabat. We are also delighted that the Second Arabic NLP School is co-located with EACL. We hope attendees enjoy this wonderful opportunity to strengthen ties with the Computational Linguistics communities across the African continent. *[Read full message](https://drive.google.com/file/d/14NlmHvwM6fPJuMmOvVh7K0vtQbEyv3SZ/view?usp=sharing)*<br><br>

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Welcome to the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). EACL 2026 will be held in Rabat, Morocco, from March 24–29, 2026. 

The spoken Arabic exhibits substantial dialectal variation in the Arabic-speaking world. This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of Arabic dialectal variation using the SADA corpus, examining lexical, morphosyntactic, and discourse-pragmatic patterns across dialects. We combine quantitative frequency-based measures with qualitative linguistic analysis, including keyword comparison, distributional profiling, collocational and trigram analyses, and similarity-based clustering. Our results show that Arabic dialects share a substantial common core, while differing systematically in frequent discourse markers, evaluative expressions, and recurrent phraseological patterns. These findings provide empirical evidence for regional clustering among contemporary dialects and for variation relative to the standard register. The study contributes linguistic insights that support both Arabic dialectology and the development of dialect-aware NLP systems.

A Corpus-Based Investigation of Contemporary Arabic Dialects Using the SADA Corpus

Several Quranic morphological corpora have been developed to support Arabic linguistic analysis and NLP applications, yet they often lack full coverage, consistency, or manual verification. We present QAMAR, a morphologically oriented, multi-task corpus derived from the Qur'an. This comprehensive, manually verified resource provides a detailed linguistic layer for every Quranic word, including the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) equivalent, the stem, the lemma, the root, and the part of speech (POS). QAMAR supports multiple NLP tasks, such as normalization, lemmatization, root extraction, and POS tagging, and serves as a gold-standard reference for Quranic and Arabic NLP research, including corpus-to-corpus evaluation and morphological analyzer benchmarking. The paper details QAMAR's annotation framework, verification process, and resource structure, and reports comparative analyses with existing Quranic morphological resources and outputs produced by current large language models (LLMs).

QAMAR: A New Fully Verified and Accurate Quranic Arabic Morphological Analysis Resource

Automatic detection of toxic and offensive content in Arabic social media is a challenging task due to rich morphology, dialectal variation, and noisy writing styles. While transformer-based language models have achieved strong performance, they often produce uncertain predictions in borderline cases. This paper presents a hybrid framework for Arabic toxicity detection that combines a pretrained Arabic-specific transformer model with a confidence-aware rule-based mechanism. The proposed approach activates automatically induced lexical rules only when the model prediction falls within a predefined gray zone of uncertainty, preserving neural dominance while improving robustness and interpretability. Experiments conducted on a manually annotated dataset of 35,000 Arabic posts demonstrate that the hybrid approach achieves consistent improvements over the baseline model, particularly in reducing false negatives for toxic content. The results indicate that selective rule activation is an effective strategy for enhancing reliability in real-world Arabic social media moderation systems.

A Hybrid Confidence-Aware Framework for Arabic Toxicity Detection in Social Media

Arabic diacritics encode phonetic information essential for pronunciation, disambiguation, and downstream applications, yet most Arabic ASR systems generate undiacritized output. In this work, we study direct speech-to-diacritized-text recognition using a single-stage ASR pipeline that predicts diacritics jointly with Arabic letters, without text-based post-processing. We evaluate two Arabic-adapted ASR architectures—wav2vec 2.0 XLSR-53 and Whisper-base—under a unified experimental setup on the ClArTTS Classical Arabic dataset. Performance is assessed using surface and lexical WER/CER alongside diacritic error rate (DER) to disentangle base transcription accuracy from diacritic realization. Our results show that Arabic-adapted wav2vec 2.0 achieves substantially lower diacritic error rates than Whisper, indicating stronger exploitation of acoustic cues relevant to vowelization. We further analyze the effect of decoding strategy and provide a detailed breakdown of diacritic errors, highlighting challenges associated with short vowels and morphosyntactic markers. These findings underscore the importance of model architecture and Arabic-specific adaptation for accurate diacritized Arabic ASR.

Arabic-Adapted One-Step Speech-to-Diacritized ASR: Evaluation and Error Analysis

How do Arabic-speaking communities express and engage with psychological stress on social media? We introduce AraStress, the first large-scale Arabic corpus dedicated to psychological stress research, comprising 175,862 public social media posts from 2020 to 2024, covering pandemic and post-pandemic periods.It fills a significant gap in Arabic mental-health NLP resources focused on stress, enabling large-scale analysis of related expressions.Unlike prior work focusing primarily on Twitter and depression or suicidality, AraStress addresses the critical gap in stress-focused resources. Our lexicon-based analysis reveals that stress-related posts elicit predominantly affective engagement and exhibit a hybrid lexical framing that integrates religious and therapeutic language. AraStress provides a foundational resource for culturally grounded computational models of stress detection and digital wellbeing in Arabic-speaking communities.

From Posts to Pressure: An Arabic Dataset about Stress and Mental-Health Monitoring

Stereotype repositories are critical to assess generative AI model safety, but currently lack adequate global coverage. It is imperative to prioritize targeted expansion, strategically addressing existing deficits, over merely increasing data volume. This work introduces a multilingual stereotype resource covering four sub-Saharan African countries that are severely underrepresented in NLP resources: Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. By utilizing socioculturally-situated, community-engaged methods, including telephonic surveys moderated in native languages, we establish a reproducible methodology that is sensitive to the region's complex linguistic diversity and traditional orality. By deliberately balancing the sample across diverse ethnic and demographic backgrounds, we ensure broad coverage, resulting in a dataset of 3,534 stereotypes in English and 3,206 stereotypes across 15 native languages.

SAFARI: A Community-Engaged Approach and Dataset of Stereotype Resources in the Sub-Saharan African Context

Many languages are predominantly spoken rather than written, and to bring the benefits of LLMs to speakers of these languages, it is essential that models cater to the voice modality. The typical approach is to cascade ASR, LLM and TTS models together, though this results in systems with high latency, making them unsuitable for natural, real-time interaction. We describe results on taking the encoder part of a Whisper-based model trained to recognise ten languages common in Uganda, and using the Ultravox architecture to project its output directly to the input embedding space of a text model based on Qwen 3 32B, also trained to have comprehension of those languages. The result is a speech LLM with high accuracy and very low latency. For most spoken prompts, we can begin streaming a text response within as low as 50 ms, and a speech audio response within around one second, making real-time spoken interaction with an LLM possible for the first time in these languages. The model is available open source.

Real-Time Spoken Instruction Following and Translation in Ugandan Languages

African languages remain severely underrepresented in large-scale speech resources, particularly for spontaneous, naturally occurring speech that reflects real-world linguistic use. We present African Voices, a large-scale, ethically governed speech dataset covering four Nigerian languages, [~2,500] hours of audio, and 2,865 speakers, with a focus on spontaneous and scripted speech across diverse sociolinguistic contexts. Unlike existing resources that primarily rely on read or scripted speech, African Voices captures natural variation in accent, dialect, register, and code-switching, accompanied by rich demographic and contextual metadata. We describe the data collection methodology, transcription and a principled governance framework designed to support responsible use of speech data in low-resource settings. We further provide baseline automatic speech recognition results across languages. African Voices enables research on robust and fair ASR and serves as a foundational resource for advancing NLP research in African languages.

African Voices Nigeria: 2500 hours of ethically sourced speech data for four Nigerian Languages

Creating speech datasets, models, and evaluation frameworks for low-resource languages remains challenging given the lack of a broad base of pertinent experience to draw from. This paper reports on the field collection of 612 hours of spontaneous speech in Bambara, a low-resource West African language; the semi-automated annotation of that dataset with transcriptions; the creation of several monolingual ultra-compact and small models using the dataset; and the automatic and human evaluation of their output. We offer practical suggestions for data collection protocols, annotation, and model design, as well as evidence for the importance of performing human evaluation. In addition to the main dataset, multiple evaluation datasets, models, and code are made publicly available.

Dealing with the Hard Facts of Low-Resource African NLP

We present SALT-31 benchmark dataset, for evaluation of machine translation (MT) models and covering 31 Ugandan languages. Unlike sentence-level evaluation sets, SALT-31 is constructed from short, scenario-driven mini-dialogues designed to preserve discourse context, pragmatics, and culturally grounded communication patterns common in everyday Ugandan settings. The dataset contains 100 English
sentences organized into 20 typical communication scenarios, each represented as a five sentence mini-sequence. It can therefore be used to evaluate both sentence-level and paragraph level machine translation, and includes nearly every language spoken in a country with high linguistic diversity.

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A Corpus-Based Investigation of Contemporary Arabic Dialects Using the SADA Corpus

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