AraGenre 2026 shared task - First Call for Participation

[El-Haj, Mo]

Dear all,

I'm pleased to announce our new shared task at ArabicNLP @ EMNLP 2026 in Budapest, Hungry, October 24-29, 2026.

AraGenre: A Hierarchical Definition-Guided Arabic Genre Classification Shared Task

AraGenre is a challenging shared task designed to test how NLP systems generalise to the unseen through:

• Few-shot training and development data
• Cross-lingual genre definitions guiding Arabic classification
• A large hidden test set of naturally occurring Arabic texts
• Unseen genre-definition combinations

The task addresses a wider challenge in NLP: building methods that can generalise from limited data and support languages and varieties that remain underrepresented in current NLP research. 

Registration now open:
https://forms.gle/RAi7SpYoRD5RgUnP6

AraGenre Codabench:
https://www.codabench.org/competitions/16356

Organisers:
- Mo El-Haj, VinUniversty, Vietnam / Lancaster University, UK.
- Saad Ezzini, KFUPM, KSA
- Mustafa Jarrar, HBKU, Qatar
- Shadi Abudalfa, KFUPM, KSA