With the incredible advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), many people have started using them to satisfy their information needs. However, utilizing LLMs might be problematic for political issues where disagreement is common and model outputs may reflect training-data biases or deliberate alignment choices. To better characterize such behavior, we assess the stances of nine LLMs on 24 politically sensitive issues using five prompting techniques. We find that models often adopt opposing stances on several issues; some positions are malleable under prompting, while others remain stable. Among the models examined, Grok-3-mini is the most persistent, whereas Mistral-7B is the least. For issues involving countries with different languages, models tend to support the side whose language is used in the prompt. Notably, no prompting technique alters model stances on the Qatar blockade or the oppression of Palestinians. We hope these findings raise user awareness when seeking political guidance from LLMs and encourage developers to address these concerns.
Polarisation research has demonstrated how people cluster in homogeneous groups with opposing opinions. However, this effect emerges not only through interaction between people, limiting communication between groups, but also between narratives, shaping opinions and partisan identities. Yet, how polarised groups collectively construct and negotiate opposing interpretations of reality, and whether narratives move between groups despite limited interactions, remains unexplored. To address this gap, we formalise the concept of narrative polarisation and demonstrate its measurement in 212 YouTube videos and 90,029 comments on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Based on structural narrative theory and implemented through a large language model, we extract the narrative roles assigned to central actors in two partisan information environments. We find that while videos produce highly polarised narratives, comments significantly reduce narrative polarisation, harmonising discourse on the surface level. However, on a deeper narrative level, recurring narrative motifs reveal additional differences between partisan groups.
Arabic dialects have long been under-represented in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research due to their non-standardization and high variability, which pose challenges for computational modeling. Recent advances in the field, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), offer promising avenues to address this gap by enabling Arabic to be modeled as a pluricentric language rather than a monolithic system. This paper presents Aladdin-FTI, our submission to the AMIYA shared task. The proposed system is designed to both generate and translate dialectal Arabic (DA). Specifically, the model supports text generation in Moroccan, Egyptian, Palestinian, Syrian, and Saudi dialects, as well as bidirectional translation between these dialects, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), and English. The code and trained model are publicly available.
Reliable agricultural data is essential for food security, land-use planning, and economic resilience, yet in Palestine, such data remains difficult to collect at scale because of fragmented landscapes, limited field access, and restrictions on aerial monitoring. This paper presents ResAF-Net, a satellite-based tree detection framework designed for large-scale agricultural monitoring in resource-constrained settings. The proposed architecture combines a ResNet-50 encoder, Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP), a feature-fusion stage, a multi-head self-attention refinement module, and an anchor-free FCOS detection head to improve tree localization in dense and heterogeneous scenes. Trained on the MillionTrees benchmark, the model achieved 82% Recall, 63.03% mAP@0.50, and 35.47% mAP@0.50:0.95 on the validation split, indicating strong sensitivity to tree presence while maintaining competitive localization quality. Beyond benchmark evaluation, we implemented the model within a web-based GIS application integrated with Palestinian cadastral data from GeoMolg, enabling tree analysis at scene, parcel, and community levels. This deployment demonstrates the practical feasibility of AI-assi
Existing MT evaluation frameworks, including automatic metrics and human evaluation schemes such as Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), are largely language-agnostic. However, they often fail to capture dialect- and culture-specific errors in diglossic languages (e.g., Arabic), where translation failures stem from mismatches in language variety, content coverage, and pragmatic appropriateness rather than surface form alone.We introduce LQM: Linguistically Motivated Multidimensional Quality Metrics for MT. LQM is a hierarchical error taxonomy for diagnosing MT errors through six linguistically grounded levels: sociolinguistics, pragmatics, semantics, morphosyntax, orthography, and graphetics (Figure 1). We construct a bidirectional parallel corpus of 3,850 sentences (550 per variety) spanning seven Arabic dialects (Egyptian, Emirati, Jordanian, Mauritanian, Moroccan, Palestinian, and Yemeni), derived from conversational, culturally rich content. We evaluate six LLMs in a zero-shot setting and conduct expert span-level human annotation using LQM, producing 6,113 labeled error spans across 3,495 unique erroneous sentences, along with severity-weighted quality scores. We complement
We present StanceNakba 2026, a shared task on stance detection in polarized social media discourse related to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, organized as part of Nakba-NLP 2026 at LREC-COLING 2026. The task introduces two subtasks: Subtask A (Actor-Level Stance Detection), which classifies English social media posts as Pro-Palestine, Pro-Israel, or Neutral; and Subtask B (Cross-Topic Stance Detection), which identifies Favor, Against, or Neither stances in Arabic posts toward two conflict-related topics, normalization with Israel and refugee presence in Jordan. The task is grounded in an annotated dataset of 2,606 social media posts. A total of 7 teams participated in Subtask A and 6 teams in Subtask B. Participating systems primarily fine-tuned Arabic and multilingual transformer-based models, including MARBERT, AraBERT, and DeBERTa-v3 variants, with several teams employing cross-validation, ensemble methods, and topic-conditioned architectures. The best-performing systems achieved a Macro F1 of 0.9620 on Subtask A and 0.8724 on Subtask B, demonstrating that transformer-based approaches are highly effective for conflict-domain stance detection while highlighting persistent chal
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly utilised for social simulation and persona generation, necessitating an understanding of how they represent geopolitical identities. In this paper, we analyse personas generated for Palestinian and Israeli identities by five popular LLMs across 640 experimental conditions, varying context (war vs non-war) and assigned roles. We observe significant distributional patterns in the generated attributes: Palestinian profiles in war contexts are frequently associated with lower socioeconomic status and survival-oriented roles, whereas Israeli profiles predominantly retain middle-class status and specialised professional attributes. When prompted with explicit instructions to avoid harmful assumptions, models exhibit diverse distributional changes, e.g., marked increases in non-binary gender inferences or a convergence toward generic occupational roles (e.g., "student"), while the underlying socioeconomic distinctions often remain. Furthermore, analysis of reasoning traces reveals an interesting dynamics between model reasoning and generation: while rationales consistently mention fairness-related concepts, the final generated personas follow
A growing body of work has shown that AI-assisted methods -- leveraging large language models, social choice methods, and collective dialogues -- can help navigate polarization and surface common ground in controlled lab settings. But what can these approaches contribute in real-world contexts? We present a case study applying these techniques to find common ground between Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilders in the period following October 7th, 2023. From April to July 2024 an iterative deliberative process combining LLMs, bridging-based ranking, and collective dialogues was conducted in partnership with the Alliance for Middle East Peace. Around 138 civil society peacebuilders participated including Israeli Jews, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza. The process resulted in a set of collective statements, including demands to world leaders, with at least 84% agreement from participants on each side. In this paper, we document the process, results, challenges, and important open questions.
This study uses the Palestinian Oral History Archive (POHA) to investigate how Palestinian refugee groups in Lebanon sustain a cohesive collective memory of the Nakba through shared narratives. Grounded in Halbwachs' theory of group memory, we employ statistical analysis of pairwise similarity of narratives, focusing on the influence of shared gender and location. We use textual representation and semantic embeddings of narratives to represent the interviews themselves. Our analysis demonstrates that shared origin is a powerful determinant of narrative similarity across thematic keywords, landmarks, and significant figures, as well as in semantic embeddings of the narratives. Meanwhile, shared residence fosters cohesion, with its impact significantly amplified when paired with shared origin. Additionally, women's narratives exhibit heightened thematic cohesion, particularly in recounting experiences of the British occupation, underscoring the gendered dimensions of memory formation. This research deepens the understanding of collective memory in diasporic settings, emphasizing the critical role of oral histories in safeguarding Palestinian identity and resisting erasure.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains one of the most polarizing geopolitical issues, with the October 2023 escalation intensifying online debate. Social media platforms, particularly Telegram, have become central to real-time news sharing, advocacy, and propaganda. In this study, we analyze Telegram, Twitter/X, and Reddit to examine how conflict narratives are produced, amplified, and contested across different digital spheres. Building on our previous work on Telegram discourse during the 2023 escalation, we extend the analysis longitudinally and cross-platform using an updated dataset spanning October 2023 to mid-2025. The corpus includes more than 187,000 Telegram messages, 2.1 million Reddit comments, and curated Twitter/X posts. We combine Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), BERTopic, and transformer-based sentiment and emotion models to identify dominant themes, emotional dynamics, and propaganda strategies. Telegram channels provide unfiltered, high-intensity documentation of events; Twitter/X amplifies frames to global audiences; and Reddit hosts more reflective and deliberative discussions. Our findings reveal persistent negative sentiment, strong coupling between human
This paper presents BAR-Analytics, a web-based, open-source platform designed to analyze news dissemination across geographical, economic, political, and cultural boundaries. Using the Russian-Ukrainian and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts as case studies, the platform integrates four analytical methods: propagation analysis, trend analysis, sentiment analysis, and temporal topic modeling. Over 350,000 articles were collected and analyzed, with a focus on economic disparities and geographical influences using metadata enrichment. We evaluate the case studies using coherence, sentiment polarity, topic frequency, and trend shifts as key metrics. Our results show distinct patterns in news coverage: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tends to have more negative sentiment with a focus on human rights, while the Russia-Ukraine conflict is more positive, emphasizing election interference. These findings highlight the influence of political, economic, and regional factors in shaping media narratives across different conflicts.
This article analyzes the Hamas-Israel controversy through 253,925 Spanish-language YouTube comments posted between October 2023 and January 2024, following the October 7 attack that escalated the conflict. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the study combines the analysis of controversies from Science and Technology Studies (STS) with advanced computational methodologies, specifically Natural Language Processing (NLP) using the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) model. Using this approach, the comments were automatically classified into seven categories, reflecting pro-Palestinian, pro-Israeli, anti- Palestinian, anti-Israeli positions, among others. The results show a predominance of pro- Palestinian comments, although pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian comments received more "likes." This study also applies the agenda-setting theory to demonstrate how media coverage significantly influences public perception, observing a notable shift in public opinion, transitioning from a pro- Palestinian stance to a more critical position towards Israel. This work highlights the importance of combining social science perspectives with technological tools in the
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict started on 7 October 2023, have resulted thus far to over 48,000 people killed including more than 17,000 children with a majority from Gaza, more than 30,000 people injured, over 10,000 missing, and over 1 million people displaced, fleeing conflict zones. The infrastructure damage includes the 87\% of housing units, 80\% of public buildings and 60\% of cropland 17 out of 36 hospitals, 68\% of road networks and 87\% of school buildings damaged. This conflict has as well launched an online discussion across various social media platforms. Telegram was no exception due to its encrypted communication and highly involved audience. The current study will cover an analysis of the related discussion in relation to different participants of the conflict and sentiment represented in those discussion. To this end, we prepared a dataset of 125K messages shared on channels in Telegram spanning from 23 October 2025 until today. Additionally, we apply the same analysis in two publicly available datasets from Twitter containing 2001 tweets and from Reddit containing 2M opinions. We apply a volume analysis across the three datasets, entity extraction and then proce
The study aims to enhance mathematics education accessibility for hard-of-hearing students by developing an accurate Palestinian sign language PSL recognition system using advanced artificial intelligence techniques. Due to the scarcity of digital resources for PSL, a custom dataset comprising 41 mathematical gesture classes was created, and recorded by PSL experts to ensure linguistic accuracy and domain specificity. To leverage state-of-the-art-computer vision techniques, a Vision Transformer ViTModel was fine-tuned for gesture classification. The model achieved an accuracy of 97.59%, demonstrating its effectiveness in recognizing mathematical signs with high precision and reliability. This study highlights the role of deep learning in developing intelligent educational tools that bridge the learning gap for hard-of-hearing students by providing AI-driven interactive solutions to enhance mathematical comprehension. This work represents a significant step toward innovative and inclusive frosting digital integration in specialized learning environments. The dataset is hosted on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/fidaakh/STEM_data.
October 7, 2023 marked the start of a war against Gaza, one of the most devastating conflicts in modern history, which quickly produced a stark global attitudinal divide. To examine the role of media bias in shaping public understanding of this asymmetrical war, we analyzed more than 14,000 news articles published during its first year across three major Western outlets (The New York Times, BBC, CNN) and one non-Western English-language outlet (Al Jazeera English). Focusing on media narratives surrounding Israeli and Palestinian victims, we identify three systematic biases in Western coverage: (1) Identifiable Victim Reporting: Israeli victims were substantially more likely to be depicted as identifiable individuals, whereas Palestinian victims were predominantly represented as undifferentiated collectives. (2) Equalization Bias: Despite the profound asymmetry in casualties, displacement, and other forms of suffering, Western reporting repeatedly invoked the October 7 attacks to equalize Israeli and Palestinian victimhood, even in the absence of new Israeli-casualty events. (3) One-sided Doubt Casting: Journalists disproportionately used language that casts doubt on the credibility
Is an LLM telling you different facts than it's telling me? This paper introduces ConsistencyAI, an independent benchmark for measuring the factual consistency of large language models (LLMs) for different personas. ConsistencyAI tests whether, when users of different demographics ask identical questions, the model responds with factually inconsistent answers. Designed without involvement from LLM providers, this benchmark offers impartial evaluation and accountability. In our experiment, we queried 19 LLMs with prompts that requested 5 facts for each of 15 topics. We repeated this query 100 times for each LLM, each time adding prompt context from a different persona selected from a subset of personas modeling the general population. We processed the responses into sentence embeddings, computed cross-persona cosine similarity, and computed the weighted average of cross-persona cosine similarity to calculate factual consistency scores. In 100-persona experiments, scores ranged from 0.9065 to 0.7896, and the mean was 0.8656, which we adopt as a benchmark threshold. xAI's Grok-3 is most consistent, while several lightweight models rank lowest. Consistency varies by topic: the job mark
In 2024 Gregor and Blais published a JSNT article using two different statistical methods to conclude, contra Bauckham (2017), that selected Apocryphal texts and the Babylonian Talmud "do not correspond to the distribution among first-century Palestinian Jews statistically significantly worse than the distribution in Gospels-Acts" and "the two corpora paradoxically align better in some respects". In this paper, we show that the first method is statistically invalid, and the second is the wrong tool for the job. This is in alignment with the critique of Van de Weghe and Wilson (2024) and in support of their use of the chi-squared goodness-of-fit test which established name occurrences in the Gospels and Acts, as opposed to Gregor and Blais` uniform, apocryphal, or Talmudic corpora, "fit into their historical context at least as well as those in the works of Josephus". Regarding this historical context, helpful insights are provided by Gregor and Blais regarding potential distortions within the onomastic reference distribution, and this article suggests a way forward, addressing orthographic issues, sample biases, several problems with the implementation of Gregor and Blais` inclusio
We report empirical evidence of web defacement and DDoS attacks carried out by low-level cybercrime actors in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Our quantitative measurements indicate an immediate increase in such cyberattacks following the Hamas-led assault and the subsequent declaration of war. However, the surges waned quickly after a few weeks, with patterns resembling those observed in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The scale of attacks and discussions within the hacking community this time was both significantly lower than those during the early days of the Russia-Ukraine war, and attacks have been prominently one-sided: many pro-Palestinian supporters have targeted Israel, while attacks on Palestine have been much less significant. Beyond targeting these two, attackers also defaced sites of other countries to express their war support. Their broader opinions are also largely disparate, with far more support for Palestine and many objections expressed toward Israel.
Purpose. This study analyzes the digital representation of the Iran-Israel conflict that occurred in June 2025, based on 120,000 comments posted on YouTube. It sought to identify discursive positions regarding the actors involved and to examine how media and algorithmic biases shape digital conversations. Methodology. A mixed-methods design with triangulation was adopted. In the quantitative phase, natural language processing techniques and machine learning models (BERT and XLM-RoBERTa) were used to classify comments into ten categories. In the qualitative phase, a critical analysis of media context and ideological narratives was conducted, complemented by manual annotation and supervised training. This strategy enabled the integration of statistical robustness with contextual understanding. Results and conclusions. The findings reveal a clear overrepresentation of pro-Palestinian and anti-United States/Israel discourses, while pro-United States and anti-Palestinian positions were marginal. Iran, usually rendered invisible in global media, emerged as a central actor in the digital conversation during the conflict, suggesting a narrative shift away from previous hegemonic frameworks
Recently, with the rapid development in the fields of technology and the increasing amount of text t available on the internet, it has become urgent to develop effective tools for processing and understanding texts in a way that summaries the content without losing the fundamental essence of the information. Given this challenge, we have developed an advanced text summarization system targeting Arabic textbooks. Relying on modern natu-ral language processing models such as MT5, AraBART, AraT5, and mBART50, this system evaluates and extracts the most important sentences found in biology textbooks for the 11th and 12th grades in the Palestinian curriculum, which enables students and teachers to obtain accurate and useful summaries that help them easily understand the content. We utilized the Rouge metric to evaluate the performance of the trained models. Moreover, experts in education Edu textbook authoring assess the output of the trained models. This approach aims to identify the best solutions and clarify areas needing improvement. This research provides a solution for summarizing Arabic text. It enriches the field by offering results that can open new horizons for research and de