Faiza Belbachir

Also published as: Faiza BELBACHIR


2026

This paper describes the system we designed for our participation in the AraSentEval 2026 shared task on Arabic dialectal sentiment analysis. We propose a transformer-based approach relying on MARBERT combined with a multi-seed ensemble strategy and several optimization techniques. Our system integrates seven independently trained models with different random initializations and applies Stochastic Weight Averaging (SWA) to improve generalization. To address class imbalance, we augment the training data through dialectal synonym replacement, increasing the dataset size by 13.9% while preserving dialect distribution. In addition, we incorporate Test-Time Augmentation (TTA) and investigate the use of pseudo-labeling based on high-confidence predictions. We report our experiments on the official dataset covering Moroccan, Egyptian, Jordanian, and Saudi dialects, and analyze the contribution of each component through ablation experiments. Our system achieved a macro F1-score of 84.62% on the test set, ranking 3rd among 15 participating teams.

2023

This paper describes the system we designed for our participation to SemEval2023 Task 12 Track 6 about Algerian dialect sentiment analysis. We propose a transformer language model approach combined with a lexicon mixing terms and emojis which is used in a post-processing filtering stage. The Algerian sentiment lexicons was extracted manually from tweets. We report on our experiments on Algerian dialect, where we compare the performance of marbert to the one of arabicbert and camelbert on the training and development datasets of Task 12. We also analyse the contribution of our post processing lexical filtering for sentiment analysis. Our system obtained a F1 score equal to 70%, ranking 9th among 30 participants.