Call for Participation: StanceEval-2026 Shared Task at ArabicNLP/EMNLP 2026

[Nuha Albadi]

Dear Colleagues,

I am pleased to announce StanceEval-2026, a shared task on Arabic stance detection organized at ArabicNLP 2026, co-located with EMNLP 2026 in Budapest, Hungary.

Stance detection remains an important and challenging task in Arabic NLP, particularly when models are required to generalize beyond targets observed during training. To encourage research in this direction, StanceEval-2026 introduces two competition tracks:

• Seen Targets: training and evaluation on targets seen during training. 
• Unseen Targets: evaluation on new targets to assess model generalization beyond training settings.

Participants are invited to develop Arabic stance detection systems using Mawqif-v2, an extended version of the Mawqif dataset with multi-label annotations for stance, sentiment, and sarcasm.

🏆 Prize Pool: $1,600
📊 Dataset: 5,117 Arabic tweets (Mawqif-v2) 
🚀 Two Competition Tracks
📅 Registration Deadline: July 20, 2026

Full details and registration:

https://stanceeval.github.io

Task Organizers:

Rasha Albalawi*, Nuha Albadi*, Hamzah Luqman*, Saad Ezzini*, Maram Kurdi*, Asma Yamani*, Ahmed Ashraf*, Maged Saeed*, and Nora S. Alturayeif**
* KFUPM, KSA
** HUMAIN, KSA

Sponsors:
SDAIA-KFUPM Joint Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (JRC-AI)

We would greatly appreciate it if you could share this call with interested students, researchers, and colleagues.