The official overview paper is out: "AraSentEval 2026: A Shared Task on Sentiment Analysis and Swapping in Arabic" by Saad Ezzini, Shadi Abudalfa, Maram I. Alharbi, Salmane Chafik, Hamzah Luqman, Mo El-Haj, Paul Rayson, and Reem Alotaibi - published in the OSACT7 proceedings @ LREC 2026 (Palma, Mallorca, 11–16 May 2026). Full proceedings PDF: http://lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2026/workshops/osact/2026.osact-1.0.pdf.

For context: the task had two subtasks: Arabic dialect sentiment classification on the new MDS-3 dataset (Moroccan/Egyptian/Jordanian/Saudi hotel reviews, 3-class), and sentiment swap on MA'AKS (rewriting a sentence to invert polarity while preserving meaning). It drew 19 final-phase participations total.

Here's every system paper that made it into the proceedings:

Subtask 1: Arabic Dialect Sentiment Classification

• TTLab at AraSentEval: SARF (صرف) Sentiment Analysis via Root-based Fusion for Multi-Dialectal Arabic: Ali Abusaleh, Bhuvanesh Verma, Alexander Mehler: this one got picked as the workshop's lightning talk for the task
• CasbAI at AraSentEval 2026: Robust Dialectal Arabic Sentiment Classification via Multi-Seed Ensembling and Data Augmentation: Chaima Abdelaziz, KahinaHouda Saadaoui, Faiza Belbachir, Lynda Said Lhadj
• BDSI at AraSentEval Shared Task: A Multi-Transformer Contrastive Learning for Arabic Dialect Sentiment Analysis: Mohamed M'haouach, Kaouthar Elyoussoufi, Abdessamad Benlahbib, Hamza Alami
• L3IA-Subtask 1 at AraSentEval Shared Task: Multi-Dialect Arabic Sentiment Classification via a Transformer-Based Approach: Mohamed M'haouach, Kaouthar Elyoussoufi, Hamza Alami, Abdessamad Benlahbib
• University of Tripoli at AraSentEval: Fine-Tuning MARBERTv2 and CAMELBERT for Multi-Dialect Arabic Sentiment Analysis: Abdusalam F. Ahmad Nwesri, Amani Bahlul Sharif, Sarah Farag S. Hmeid
• LinguArabic at AraSentEval 2026: MARBERT for Multi-Dialect Arabic Sentiment Analysis: Norah Saud Alshahrani, Elham Abdullah Al-Qarni, Shatha Hussan Alshomrani

Subtask 2: Arabic Sentiment Swap

• A Comparative Study of Arabic Sentiment Swap Models for AraSentEval 2026: Yumna Hamdy, Mohab ElDamhougy, Yomna Eid, Ensaf Hussein
• L3IA at AraSentEval 2026 Subtask 2: LLM-Based Multi-Step Pipeline for Arabic Sentiment Swap : Abdessamad Benlahbib, Hamza Alami, Mohamed M'haouach, Kaouthar Elyoussoufi
• Codezone Research Group at AraSentEval Shared Task: Arabic Sentiment Swap beyond Negation Prepending, Benchmarking Multilingual T5 against Large Language Models on the MA'AKS Corpus: Abdulkadir Shehu Bichi, Sarah Yassine

A few patterns worth noting just from the titles: MARBERT/CAMELBERT fine-tuning and ensembling dominate the classification side, while the swap subtask splits between LLM pipelines and more classic seq2seq (T5) baselines: useful if you're weighing which approach to try on a similar dialectal task. For exact leaderboard rankings and metrics, check the overview paper linked above.

Sources:

• OSACT7 workshop proceedings (PDF)
• OSACT7 workshop page
• AraSentEval 2026 task site