MAHED Shared Task: Multimodal Detection of Hope and Hate Emotions in Arabic Content
Wajdi Zaghouani, Md. Rafiul Biswas, Mabrouka Bessghaier, Shimaa Ibrahim, George Mikros, Abul Hasnat, Firoj Alam
Abstract
This paper presents the MAHED 2025 Shared Task on Multimodal Detection of Hope and Hate Emotions in Arabic Content, comprising three subtasks: (1) text-based classification of Arabic content into hate and hope, (2) multi-task learning for joint prediction of emotions, offensive content, and hate speech, and (3) multimodal detection of hateful content in Arabic memes. We provide three high-quality datasets totaling over 22,000 instances sourced from social media platforms, annotated by native Arabic speakers with Cohen’s Kappa exceeding 0.85. Our evaluation attracted 46 leaderboard submissions from participants, with systems leveraging Arabic-specific pre-trained language models (AraBERT, MARBERT), large language models (GPT-4, Gemini), and multimodal fusion architectures combining CLIP vision encoders with Arabic text models. The best-performing systems achieved macro F1-scores of 0.723 (Task 1), 0.578 (Task 2), and 0.796 (Task 3), with top teams employing ensemble methods, class-weighted training, and OCR-aware multimodal fusion. Analysis reveals persistent challenges in dialectal robustness, minority class detection for hope speech, and highlights key directions for future Arabic content moderation research.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.75
- Volume:
- Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Suzhou, China
- Editors:
- Kareem Darwish, Ahmed Ali, Ibrahim Abu Farha, Samia Touileb, Imed Zitouni, Ahmed Abdelali, Sharefah Al-Ghamdi, Sakhar Alkhereyf, Wajdi Zaghouani, Salam Khalifa, Badr AlKhamissi, Rawan Almatham, Injy Hamed, Zaid Alyafeai, Areeb Alowisheq, Go Inoue, Khalil Mrini, Waad Alshammari
- Venue:
- ArabicNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 560–574
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.75/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Wajdi Zaghouani, Md. Rafiul Biswas, Mabrouka Bessghaier, Shimaa Ibrahim, George Mikros, Abul Hasnat, and Firoj Alam. 2025. MAHED Shared Task: Multimodal Detection of Hope and Hate Emotions in Arabic Content. In Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference: Shared Tasks, pages 560–574, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- MAHED Shared Task: Multimodal Detection of Hope and Hate Emotions in Arabic Content (Zaghouani et al., ArabicNLP 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.arabicnlp-sharedtasks.75.pdf