Call for Participation: BAREC Shared Task 2026

[Khalid Nabigh Elmadani Ahmed]

BAREC Shared Task 2026

The Second Shared Task on Arabic Readability Assessment

The Fourth Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference (ArabicNLP 2026)

co-located with EMNLP 2026

We are excited to announce the BAREC Shared Task 2026 on fine-grained readability classification across 19 levels using the Balanced Arabic Readability Evaluation Corpus (BAREC), a dataset of over 1 million words. Participants will build models for both sentence- and document-level classification.

Task 1: Sentence-level Readability Assessment

Given an Arabic sentence, predict its readability level on a scale from 1 (i.e., first grade) to 19 (i.e., university level), indicating the degree of reading difficulty.

Task 2: Document-level Readability Assessment

Given a document consisting of multiple sentences, predict its readability level on a scale from 1 to 19, where the hardest (i.e., highest readability) sentence in the document determines the overall document readability level.

For each task, there will be three tracks, allowing different data sources for training: Strict, Constrained, and Open.

Important Dates:

All deadlines are 11:59pm UTC-12 (anywhere on Earth):

• June 3, 2026: Release of training, dev and open test data, and evaluation scripts.
• July 20, 2026: Registration deadline and release of test data.
• July 25, 2026: End of evaluation cycle (test set submission closes).
• August 8, 2026: System description paper submissions due.
• August 15, 2026: Notification of acceptance.
• August 15, 2026: Final results released.
• August 22, 2026: Camera-ready versions due.

Awards:

• Top-performing Systems:
  • We will recognize the top-performing system in each of the two tasks + track combinations (2 tasks × 3 tracks), with a $100 prize per winning team.
• Best System Description Papers:
  • We will award one or two prizes for Best System Description Papers. These will recognize clarity, reproducibility, and insight, regardless of leaderboard ranking:
    • Best Paper: $250
    • Runner-up or Honorable Mention: $150

Organizers:

• Khalid N. Elmadani: New York University Abu Dhabi
• Bashar Alhafni: Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
• Hanada Taha-Thomure: Zayed University
• Nizar Habash: New York University Abu Dhabi

The BAREC Project is supported by the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Center, CAMeL Lab, and ZAI.

Contact:

For any questions related to this task, check out the FAQs. Feel free to post your questions on our Slack workspace. You are also welcome to contact the organizers directly at this email address: barec26.o...@camel-lab.com.