ArAIEval Shared Task: Persuasion Techniques and Disinformation Detection in Arabic Text

We present an overview of the ArAIEval shared task, organized as part of the first ArabicNLP 2023 conference co-located with EMNLP 2023. ArAIEval offers two tasks over Arabic text: (i) persuasion technique detection, focusing on identifying persuasion techniques in tweets and news articles, and (ii) disinformation detection in binary and multiclass setups over tweets. A total of 20 teams participated in the final evaluation phase, with 14 and 16 teams participating in Tasks 1 and 2, respectively. Across both tasks, we observed that fine-tuning transformer models such as AraBERT was at the core of the majority of the participating systems. We provide a description of the task setup, including a description of the dataset construction and the evaluation setup. We further give a brief overview of the participating systems. All datasets and evaluation scripts from the shared task are released to the research community. (https://araieval.gitlab.io/) We hope this will enable further research on these important tasks in Arabic.

LLMeBench: A Flexible Framework for Accelerating LLMs Benchmarking

The recent development and success of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitate an evaluation of their performance across diverse NLP tasks in different languages. Although several frameworks have been developed and made publicly available, their customization capabilities for specific tasks and datasets are often complex for different users. In this study, we introduce the LLMeBench framework. Initially developed to evaluate Arabic NLP tasks using OpenAI's GPT and BLOOM models; it can be seamlessly customized for any NLP task and model, regardless of language. The framework also features zero- and few-shot learning settings. A new custom dataset can be added in less than 10 minutes, and users can use their own model API keys to evaluate the task at hand. The developed framework has been already tested on 31 unique NLP tasks using 53 publicly available datasets within 90 experimental setups, involving approximately 296K data points. We plan to open-source the framework for the community (https://github.com/qcri/LLMeBench/). A video demonstrating the framework is available online (https://youtu.be/FkQn4UjYA0s).

Detecting and Reasoning of Deleted Tweets before they are Posted

Social media platforms empower us in several ways, from information dissemination to consumption. While these platforms are useful in promoting citizen journalism, public awareness etc., they have misuse potentials. Malicious users use them to disseminate hate-speech, offensive content, rumor etc. to gain social and political agendas or to harm individuals, entities and organizations. Often times, general users unconsciously share information without verifying it, or unintentionally post harmful messages. Some of such content often get deleted either by the platform due to the violation of terms and policies, or users themselves for different reasons, e.g., regrets. There is a wide range of studies in characterizing, understanding and predicting deleted content. However, studies which aims to identify the fine-grained reasons (e.g., posts are offensive, hate speech or no identifiable reason) behind deleted content, are limited. In this study we address this gap, by identifying deleted tweets, particularly within the Arabic context, and labeling them with a corresponding fine-grained disinformation category. We then develop models that can predict the potentiality of tweets getting deleted, as well as the potential reasons behind deletion. Such models can help in moderating social media posts before even posting.