WojoodNER 2023: The First Arabic Named Entity Recognition Shared Task
This work addresses the problem of limited resources and evaluation standards for Arabic NER, benefiting researchers and practitioners in natural language processing, though it is incremental as it builds on existing NER concepts.
The paper tackled the lack of standardized benchmarks for Arabic Named Entity Recognition (NER) by introducing WojoodNER-2023, the first Arabic NER shared task, which resulted in winning teams achieving F1 scores of 91.96 for FlatNER and 93.73 for NestedNER.
We present WojoodNER-2023, the first Arabic Named Entity Recognition (NER) Shared Task. The primary focus of WojoodNER-2023 is on Arabic NER, offering novel NER datasets (i.e., Wojood) and the definition of subtasks designed to facilitate meaningful comparisons between different NER approaches. WojoodNER-2023 encompassed two Subtasks: FlatNER and NestedNER. A total of 45 unique teams registered for this shared task, with 11 of them actively participating in the test phase. Specifically, 11 teams participated in FlatNER, while $8$ teams tackled NestedNER. The winning teams achieved F1 scores of 91.96 and 93.73 in FlatNER and NestedNER, respectively.