StanceEval 2024: The First Arabic Stance Detection Shared Task

Recently, there has been a growing interest in analyzing user-generated text to understand opinions expressed on social media. In NLP, this task is known as stance detection, where the goal is to predict whether the writer is in favor, against, or has no opinion on a given topic. Stance detection is crucial for applications such as sentiment analysis, opinion mining, and social media monitoring, as it helps in capturing the nuanced perspectives of users on various subjects. As part of the ArabicNLP 2024 program, we organized the first shared task on Arabic Stance Detection, StanceEval 2024. This initiative aimed to foster advancements in stance detection for the Arabic language, a relatively underrepresented area in Arabic NLP research. This overview paper provides a detailed description of the shared task, covering the dataset, the methodologies used by various teams, and a summary of the results from all participants. We received 28 unique team registrations, and during the testing phase, 16 teams submitted valid entries. The highest classification F-score obtained was 84.38.