StanceEval 2026: The Second Stance Detection Shared Task

Rasha Albalawi; Nuha Albadi; Hamzah Luqman; Asma Yamani; Maram Kurdi; Saad Ezzini; Ahmed Ashraf; Maged Al-Shaibani; Nora Alturayeif

arXiv · 2610.03215

StanceEval 2026: The Second Stance Detection Shared Task

Rasha Albalawi·Nuha Albadi·Hamzah Luqman·Asma Yamani·Maram Kurdi·Saad Ezzini·Ahmed Ashraf·Maged Al-Shaibani·Nora Alturayeif

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Abstract

StanceEval 2026 is the second edition of the StanceEval shared task series on stance detection in Arabic social media text. Stance detection aims to identify a writer's stance toward a given topic. Given a tweet and a target, participating systems must determine whether the writer's stance is Favor, Against, or None. This edition focuses on cross-target generalization across two distinct evaluation tracks: Track 1 evaluates thematically related cross-target transfer (testing on Women Driving, related to Women Empowerment from training data), while Track 2 evaluates cross-domain transfer to completely unseen targets (E-Cars and Trimester System). The shared task attracted 80 registered teams from 12 countries. During the evaluation phase, 30 unique teams submitted entries, with 21 teams officially ranked in Track 1 and 13 in Track 2 following validation filtering, and 20 teams submitting system-description papers. Participating teams employed diverse methodologies, including fine-tuned pretrained language models, prompt-based and retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs), fine-tuned LLMs, and hybrid cascades. Top systems achieved impressive $F_{avg2}$ scores of 0.8994 on Track 1 and 0.9400 on Track 2, substantially outperforming the strongest baselines (0.7366 and 0.7475, respectively), where $F_{avg2}$ denotes the macro-averaged F1 score over the Favor and Against classes. Counterintuitively, performance on the unseen targets was higher than on the related target, a disparity could be driven by extreme target polarization, class imbalance, and dialectal or sarcastic nuance across topics.

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Rasha Albalawi, Nuha Albadi, Hamzah Luqman, Asma Yamani, Maram Kurdi, Saad Ezzini, Ahmed Ashraf, Maged Al-Shaibani, Nora Alturayeif. 2026-10-02. StanceEval 2026: The Second Stance Detection Shared Task. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03215

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