@inproceedings{charfi-etal-2024-marasta,
    title = "{MARASTA}: A Multi-dialectal {A}rabic Cross-domain Stance Corpus",
    author = "Charfi, Anis  and
      Ben-Sghaier, Mabrouka  and
      Atalla, Andria Samy Raouf  and
      Akasheh, Raghda  and
      Al-Emadi, Sara  and
      Zaghouani, Wajdi",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.964",
    pages = "11060--11069",
    abstract = "This paper introduces a cross-domain and multi-dialectal stance corpus for Arabic that includes four regions in the Arab World and covers the main Arabic dialect groups. Our corpus consists of 4657 sentences manually annotated with each sentence{'}s stance towards a specific topic. For each region, we collected sentences related to two controversial topics. We annotated each sentence by at least two annotators to indicate if its stance favors the topic, is against it, or is neutral. Our corpus is well-balanced concerning dialect and stance. Approximately half of the sentences are in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) for each region, and the other half is in the region{'}s respective dialect. We conducted several machine-learning experiments for stance detection using our new corpus. Our most successful model is the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), using Unigram or TF-IDF extracted features, which yielded an F1-score of 0.66 and an accuracy score of 0.66. Compared with the most similar state-of-the-art dataset, our dataset outperformed in specific stance classes, particularly {``}neutral{''} and {``}against{''}.",
}

This paper introduces a cross-domain and multi-dialectal stance corpus for Arabic that includes four regions in the Arab World and covers the main Arabic dialect groups. Our corpus consists of 4657 sentences manually annotated with each sentence{'}s stance towards a specific topic. For each region, we collected sentences related to two controversial topics. We annotated each sentence by at least two annotators to indicate if its stance favors the topic, is against it, or is neutral. Our corpus is well-balanced concerning dialect and stance. Approximately half of the sentences are in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) for each region, and the other half is in the region{'}s respective dialect. We conducted several machine-learning experiments for stance detection using our new corpus. Our most successful model is the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), using Unigram or TF-IDF extracted features, which yielded an F1-score of 0.66 and an accuracy score of 0.66. Compared with the most similar state-of-the-art dataset, our dataset outperformed in specific stance classes, particularly {``}neutral{''} and {``}against{''}.
Charfi, Anis Ben-Sghaier, Mabrouka Atalla, Andria Samy Raouf Akasheh, Raghda Al-Emadi, Sara Zaghouani, Wajdi
MARASTA: A Multi-dialectal Arabic Cross-domain Stance Corpus