Ayman Khalafallah

Ahmad Shapiro, Ayman Khalafallah, Marwan Torki · gatech

Online presence on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter has become a daily habit for internet users. Despite the vast amount of services the platforms offer for their users, users suffer from cyber-bullying, which further leads to mental abuse and may escalate to cause physical harm to individuals or targeted groups. In this paper, we present our submission to the Arabic Hate Speech 2022 Shared Task Workshop (OSACT5 2022) using the associated Arabic Twitter dataset. The shared task consists of 3 sub-tasks, sub-task A focuses on detecting whether the tweet is offensive or not. Then, For offensive Tweets, sub-task B focuses on detecting whether the tweet is hate speech or not. Finally, For hate speech Tweets, sub-task C focuses on detecting the fine-grained type of hate speech among six different classes. Transformer models proved their efficiency in classification tasks, but with the problem of over-fitting when fine-tuned on a small or an imbalanced dataset. We overcome this limitation by investigating multiple training paradigms such as Contrastive learning and Multi-task learning along with Classification fine-tuning and an ensemble of our top 5 performers. Our proposed solution achieved 0.841, 0.817, and 0.476 macro F1-average in sub-tasks A, B, and C respectively.

Bassam Matar, Mohamed Fayed, Ayman Khalafallah

This paper describes AraS2P, our speech-to-phonemes system submitted to the Iqra'Eval 2025 Shared Task. We adapted Wav2Vec2-BERT via Two-Stage training strategy. In the first stage, task-adaptive continue pretraining was performed on large-scale Arabic speech-phonemes datasets, which were generated by converting the Arabic text using the MSA Phonetiser. In the second stage, the model was fine-tuned on the official shared task data, with additional augmentation from XTTS-v2-synthesized recitations featuring varied Ayat segments, speaker embeddings, and textual perturbations to simulate possible human errors. The system ranked first on the official leaderboard, demonstrating that phoneme-aware pretraining combined with targeted augmentation yields strong performance in phoneme-level mispronunciation detection.