Call for Participation: ArGuard Shared Task at ArabicNLP 2026

[Wajdi Zaghouani]

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to participate in ArGuard 2026, a shared task on Harmful Content Detection in Arabic Memes and LLM Prompts, organized as part of ArabicNLP 2026.

** Please note that the registration fees will be fully waived for all the shared tasks participants **

ArGuard provides a benchmark for Arabic content safety research through two complementary tracks:

Track A: Multimodal Hateful Meme Detection

Participants develop systems to identify hateful Arabic memes by jointly analyzing images and embedded text.

• A1: Hateful vs. Not Hateful Classification

• A2: Fine-Grained Multi-Label Category Prediction

Track B: Textual Harmful Prompt Detection

Participants develop systems to detect harmful prompts directed at Large Language Models (LLMs).

• B1: Safe vs. Unsafe Prompt Detection

• B2: Harm Category Classification

The shared task addresses Arabic-specific challenges including dialectal variation, code-switching, sarcasm, cultural references, and multimodal reasoning.

Important Dates

• August 1, 2026: Registration deadline and test set release

• August 6, 2026: Run submission deadline

• August 8, 2026: Leaderboard release

• August 18, 2026: Shared task paper submission deadline

• August 30, 2026: Notification of acceptance

• September 10, 2026: Camera-ready papers due

• October 24–29, 2026: ArabicNLP 2026 Conference

Please note that teams can submit their shared task system paper and have it published in the ArabicNLP 2026 Conference proceedings without paying any registration or publication fees.

We strongly encourage researchers, students, and industry practitioners working in NLP, multimodal AI, content moderation, AI safety, and Arabic language technologies to participate.

Additional resources, datasets, baselines, and evaluation details are available at:

Task Website: https://araieval.github.io/ArGuard-2026/
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/araieval/ArGuard-2026

If you have any questions, please contact the organizing team.

We look forward to your participation and contributions to advancing Arabic AI safety research.

Best regards,

The ArGuard 2026 Organizing Committee

Firoj Alam (QCRI, HBKU)
Md. Rafiul Biswas (HBKU)
Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi (QCRI, HBKU)
Ali Ezzat Shahroor (QCRI, HBKU)
Hamdy Mubarak (QCRI, HBKU)
Georgios Mikros (HBKU)
Abul Hasnat (APAVI.AI)
Wajdi Zaghouani (Northwestern University in Qatar)