!MSA at BAREC Shared Task 2025: Ensembling Arabic Transformers for Readability Assessment
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Abstract (arXiv)
We present MSAs winning system for the BAREC 2025 Shared Task on fine-grained Arabic readability assessment, achieving first place in six of six tracks. Our approach is a confidence-weighted ensemble of four complementary transformer models (AraBERTv2, AraELECTRA, MARBERT, and CAMeLBERT) each fine-tuned with distinct loss functions to capture diverse readability signals. To tackle severe class imbalance and data scarcity, we applied weighted training, advanced preprocessing, SAMER corpus relabeling with our strongest model, and synthetic data generation via Gemini 2.5 Flash, adding about 10,000 rare-level samples. A targeted post-processing step corrected prediction distribution skew, delivering a 6.3 percent Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) gain. Our system reached 87.5 percent QWK at the sentence level and 87.4 percent at the document level, demonstrating the power of model and loss diversity, confidence-informed fusion, and intelligent augmentation for robust Arabic readability prediction.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 9 of its 24 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2025.
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References · 9
- 2020AraBERT: Transformer-based Model for Arabic Language Understandingcited by 362
- 2020ARBERT & MARBERT: Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Arabiccited by 166
- 2021The Interplay of Variant, Size, and Task Type in Arabic Pre-trained Language Modelscited by 119
- 2015Yara Parser: A Fast and Accurate Dependency Parsercited by 111
- 2020AraELECTRA: Pre-Training Text Discriminators for Arabic Language Understandingcited by 43
- 2024The SAMER Arabic Text Simplification Corpuscited by 9
- 2025A Large and Balanced Corpus for Fine-grained Arabic Readability Assessmentcited by 8
- 2024Guidelines for Fine-grained Sentence-level Arabic Readability Annotationcited by 3
- 2024Strategies for Arabic Readability Modelingcited by 2
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