--- title: "ArabDiscrim: A Decade-Long Arabic Facebook — Zaghouani 2026" description: "Arabic datasets on hate speech and discrimination have been built almost entirely from Twitter." authors: ["Wajdi Zaghouani", "Shimaa Amer Ibrahim", "Mabrouka Bessghaier", "Houda Bouamor"] year: 2026 venue: "Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference" source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.929/" doi: "10.63317/363iym4fo7cx" licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/zaghouani-2026-arabdiscrim-decade-long-arabic-facebook/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/zaghouani-2026-arabdiscrim-decade-long-arabic-facebook/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/) / [2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2026/) / ArabDiscrim: A Decade-Long Arabic Facebook Corpus on Racism and Discrimination # ArabDiscrim: A Decade-Long Arabic Facebook Corpus on Racism and Discrimination **Authors:** [Wajdi Zaghouani](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/wajdi-zaghouani/), [Shimaa Amer Ibrahim](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/shimaa-amer-ibrahim/), [Mabrouka Bessghaier](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/mabrouka-bessghaier/), [Houda Bouamor](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/houda-bouamor/) · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.929/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.929.pdf) · [DOI 10.63317/363iym4fo7cx](https://doi.org/10.63317/363iym4fo7cx) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7160220191) **Citations:** 0 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) ## Summary Arabic datasets on hate speech and discrimination have been built almost entirely from Twitter. Facebook has been neglected, even though it reaches several times more users in the MENA region and exposes richer engagement data. ArabDiscrim addresses this gap with 293,056 public Arabic posts from Facebook pages, collected via CrowdTangle over a ten-year window (July 2014–July 2024). The authors retrieved candidates with broad lexicon-based keyword queries. They then filtered them by applying morphology-aware regex families and attribution patterns to four text fields, including OCR text from images, and removed near-duplicates. Beyond the corpus, they release a lexical toolkit: - curated terms - inflection-covering patterns - identity-based discrimination axes - explicit attribution constructions Each post keeps its reaction breakdown, shares, comments, timestamps and page metadata, so wording and audience reaction can be analyzed jointly. The corpus has no manual labels. It targets weak supervision, axis-aware sampling and platform-ecology studies, and will be distributed under a restricted, application-based research license. ## Key points - **Corpus:** 293,056 posts from 5,872 public pages. Each record stores seven reaction types (Like, Love, Wow, Haha, Sad, Angry, Care), along with text drawn from four separate fields (Message, Description, Image Text, Link Text). - **Lexicon:** 200 curated terms (100 racism, 100 discrimination) validated by native speakers. Regex families cover 13+ inflected forms per lemma. - **Axes and patterns:** 20 discrimination axes, plus attribution templates of the form "based on + [axis]." - **Post types:** Photo 43%, Status 31%, Native Video 12%; OCR'd image text holds about 22% of discriminatory content. - **Limitations:** Lexicon-driven retrieval misses implicit or coded hate and also captures news and anti-racism posts. CrowdTangle was shut down in August 2024. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/shelves/linguistics/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{zaghouani2026arabdiscrim, title = {{ArabDiscrim: A Decade-Long Arabic Facebook Corpus on Racism and Discrimination}}, author = {Zaghouani, Wajdi and Ibrahim, Shimaa Amer and Bessghaier, Mabrouka and Bouamor, Houda}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference}, year = {2026}, doi = {10.63317/363iym4fo7cx}, url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/363iym4fo7cx} } ``` - [← previous Annotation Matters: Resolving Cross-Corpus Performance Drops in Hebrew Offensive Language Detection](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/aclbulk-2026-hefetz-annotation-matters-resolving-cross-corpus/) - [next → Arabic Morphosyntactic Tagging and Dependency Parsing with Large Language Models](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/langstream-2026-adel-arabic-morphosyntactic-tagging-dependency-parsing/) - [↑ back to papers of 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2026/) ## References 17 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. 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