This paper presents the pipeline developed by the AAST-NLP team to address both the persuasion technique detection and disinformation detection shared tasks. The proposed system for all the tasks’ sub-tasks consisted of preprocessing the data and finetuning AraBERT on the given datasets, in addition to several procedures performed for each subtask to adapt to the problems faced in it. The previously described system was used in addition to Dice loss as the loss function for sub-task 1A, which consisted of a binary classification problem. In that sub-task, the system came in eleventh place. We trained the AraBERT for task 1B, which was a multi-label problem with 24 distinct labels, using binary cross-entropy to train a classifier for each label. On that sub-task, the system came in third place. We utilised AraBERT with Dice loss on both subtasks 2A and 2B, ranking second and third among the proposed models for the respective subtasks.

Arabic dialects have extensive global usage owing to their significance and the vast number of Arabic speakers. However, technological progress and globalization are leading to significant transformations within Arabic dialects. They are acquiring new characteristics involving novel vocabulary and integrating of linguistic elements from diverse dialects. Consequently, sentiment analysis of these dialects is becoming more challenging. This study categorizes dialects among 18 countries, as introduced by the Nuanced Arabic Dialect Identification (NADI) shared task competition. Our approach incorporates the utilization of the MARABERT and MARABERT v2 models with a range of methodologies, including a feature extraction process. Our findings reveal that the most effective model is achieved by applying averaging and concatenation to the hidden layers of MARABERT v2, followed by feeding the resulting output into convolutional layers. Furthermore, employing the ensemble method on various methods enhances the model’s performance. Our system secures the 6th position among the top performers in the First subtask, achieving an F1 score of 83.73%.