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Do you really trust the responses of Large Language Models (LLMs) to your religious questions?

Are you looking for a high-value research problem or competition for your undergraduate or MSc thesis, or to enhance your research skills?

Registration is now open for the IslamicEval 2026 shared task, “Accurate Detection of Hallucinations in Arabic Islamic Content,” which will be held as part of the ArabicNLP 2026 conference, concurrently with the EMNLP 2026 conference in Budapest, Hungary.

This task focuses on detecting, verifying, correcting, and assessing the relevance of Quranic and Hadith quotations in the responses generated by large linguistic models (LLMs) to answer religious questions posed to them. Building on last year’s first edition of the shared task (IslamicEval 2025), this edition adopts a more rigorous methodology with four independent sub-tasks.

✨Subtasks

💡Subtask 1 Span Detection: Find the spans of claimed fragments and label each as Ayah, Hadith matn, isnad, or claimed source.

💡Subtask 2 Hallucination Identification: Label each fragment correct or incorrect. Isnad and claimed source are judged only when their corresponding Ayahs and matns are correct, N/A otherwise.

💡Subtask 3 Hallucination Correction: Provide the canonical text for incorrect Ayahs and Hadith matns. Covers Ayahs and Hadiths two types only.

💡Subtask 4 Answer Relevance: Decide whether a citation is actually relevant to answering the question it was given for.

⚠️Each subtask is independent and has its own dataset, so teams can participate in any of them.

⚠️Participating teams are allowed to use models with 13 billion parameters or fewer.

⚠️Important Dates

  • July 1, 2026: Training and Development Data Blog Available
  • July 20, 2026: Registration Deadline
  • July 23, 2026: Test Data Blog Published
  • August 1, 2026: Results Delivered

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  Category: Conference Papar

59 posts
May 10th, 2026

Organizing IslamicEval 2026 shared task!

Do you really trust the responses of Large Language Models (LLMs) to your religious questions? Are you looking for a […]

April 26th, 2026

Qayyem: Demo paper accepted at ACL 2026!

I am delighted and proud that our demo paper, “Qayyem: A Real-time Platform for Scoring Proficiency of Arabic Essays,” has […]

April 7th, 2026

Full paper accepted at ACL 2026 Findings!

“Praise be to ALLAH” …Very happy and proud that our paper titled “MAPLE: A Meta-learning Framework for Cross-Prompt Essay Scoring” […]

April 2nd, 2026

Gave a talk at QU!

I gave a research lecture this Thursday at Qatar University titled “Beyond the “Red Pen”: Automated Correction of Arabic Articles […]

February 12th, 2026

3 full AES papers accepted at LREC 2026!

We got three full papers, all about automated essay scoring (AES) but on different aspects, accepted at the 16th Language […]

February 4th, 2026

bigIR at Web Summit Qatar 2026

Praise be to God, we are proud to represent Qatar University and present our research on “Automated Scoring of Arabic […]

January 14th, 2026

Got an internal research grant as PI

I’m pleased to announce that I got an internal research grant of $82,191 on a 2-year project proposal led by […]

January 4th, 2026

LAILA: A new Arabic AES dataset accepted at EACL 2026!

We are pleased to present to the Arab research community a dataset that is the largest and most important of […]

January 3rd, 2026

My YouTube DL lectures linked on UDL book website!

It’s really an honor that my YouTube lectures of the Deep Learning course at Qatar University are linked on the […]

December 1st, 2025

Gave an online talk at PTU, Palestine!

I was extremely pleased and honored to deliver a lecture in Arabic this week (via Zoom) at Palestine Technical University […]

November 26th, 2025

Gave a talk at MWC Doha!

I Have represented Qatar University at MWC Doha by giving a talk titled “Beyond the “Red Pen”: Automated Arabic Essay […]

October 25th, 2025

Gave a talk at AUB, Lebanon!

I was honored and delighted to deliver a lecture last week at the American University of Beirut (AUB), at the […]

July 15th, 2025

Sohaila received GSRA PhD grant!

My prospective PhD student, Sohaila Eltanbouly has just received a 4-year Graduate Sponsorship Research Award (GSRA) grant from QRDI for […]

July 1st, 2025

Promoted to full professor!

الحمد لله أولا وأخيرا على نعمه وفضله.Praise be to God, first and last, for His blessings and grace. I am […]

December 17th, 2024

Full paper (led by Marwa) accepted at ECIR 2025!

My PhD student Marwa has gotten a full paper accepted at ECIR 2025 (23% acceptance rate this year!). The paper […]

March 26th, 2024

Full paper (led by Salam) accepted at SIGIR 2024!

We got a full paper accepted at SIGIR 2024, the TOP and most prestigious conference in the field! The paper […]

April 1st, 2023

Tahaqqaq demo paper accepted at SIGIR!

Tahaqqaq, our real-time system for assisting Twitter users in Arabic claim verification has just been accepted at SIGIR 2023, the […]

December 13th, 2022

Short paper (led by Fatima) accepted at ECIR 2023!

A new short paper is accepted at The 45th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2023). The paper is led […]

July 26th, 2022

Full paper accepted at ICWSM 2023!

I’m pleased to announce that my full paper titled “Catch Me If You Can: Deceiving Stance Detection and Geotagging Models […]

November 19th, 2021

Full paper accepted at ECIR 2022!

I’m Proud of my MSc student Watheq Mansour who got his first *first-author* full paper titled “Did I see it […]

July 16th, 2020

Short paper accepted at CIKM 2020!

The paper of my PhD student Marwa Essam titled “Why is That a Background Article? A Qualitative Analysis of Relevance […]

July 16th, 2020

Full paper accepted at ICWSM 2021!

Our full paper titled “Embeddings-Based Clustering for Target Specific Stances: The Case of a Polarized Turkey” has just been accepted […]

April 14th, 2020

ArCOV-19 dataset released & paper online!

Our newly-curated dataset, ArCOV-19 has just been released here and associated ArXiv paper is online here. ArCOV-19 is an Arabic […]

November 13th, 2019

Ranked 2nd at TREC News 2019!

The work of my PhD student Marwa Essam, who participated for the first time in TREC 2019, has been ranked […]

January 18th, 2019

bigIR Twitter account is up!

A twitter account for our research group bigIR has just been online! The account will share our group’s news and […]

August 15th, 2018

Reem awarded GSRA grant!

Reem Suwaileh, a member of our research group, has just been awarded GSRA grant from QNRF to financially support her […]

August 7th, 2018

2 papers accepted at CIKM 2018 !!

Our group has two papers just accepted at CIKM 2018! A full paper with Mucahid, Maram, and Matt (17% acceptance […]

July 25th, 2018

Full paper accepted at DESIRES’18 !

Our full paper titled “Mix and Match: Collaborative Expert-Crowd Judging for Building Test Collections Accurately and Affordably” led by Mucahid Kutlu […]

June 5th, 2018

Reem defended her MSc thesis with distinction!

My student Reem Suwaileh has successfully defended her MSc thesis titled “On the Relevance Filtering for Real-time Summarization” and got […]

May 22nd, 2018

Received “Excellence in Services” award from our CSE dept.!

Received the Excellence in Services award from Computer Science and Engineering Dept. at Qatar University for the academic year 2017/2018.

March 29th, 2018

Full paper accepted at HComp 2018!

Our full paper titled “Your Behavior Signals Your Reliability: Modeling Crowd Behavioral Traces to Ensure Quality Relevance Annotations” led by […]

March 26th, 2018

BroDyn’18 workshop @ ECIR was a success!

With about 20 attendees, BroDyn’18 workshop “the 1st International Workshop on Analysis of Broad Dynamic Topics over Social Media” was […]

December 21st, 2017

Our IRJ article is now online!

Our IRJ journal article “EveTAR: building a large-scale multi-task test collection over Arabic tweets” has been published online here. Download […]

December 13th, 2017

Paper accepted at LREC 2018!

A paper has been accepted at LREC 2018, titled “DART: A Large Dataset of Dialectal Arabic Tweets” with my senior […]

October 17th, 2017

Arabic Processing Workshop accepted at LREC 2018!

Our proposed workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools (OSACT) was accepted at LREC 2018. The workshop is co-organized […]

October 12th, 2017

BroDyn workshop accepted at ECIR’18!

Our proposed workshop on Analysis of Broad Dynamic Topics over Social Media (BroDyn) was accepted at ECIR 2018. The workshop […]

September 14th, 2017

Another journal article accepted at IP&M!

Our journal article titled “Intelligent Topic Selection for Low-Cost Information Retrieval Evaluation: A New Perspective on Deep vs. Shallow Judging” […]

September 12th, 2017

Fact-Checking Lab accepted at CLEF 2018!

Our lab proposal titled “Automatic Identification and Verification of Claims in Political Debates” has been accepted at CLEF 2018. The […]

August 15th, 2017

Journal article accepted at IP&M!

Our journal article titled “Query Performance Prediction for Microblog Search” has been finally accepted for publication at Information Processing and Management (IP&M) […]

June 20th, 2017

Elected as coordinator of Data Science group at CSE dept!

I have been elected as the coordinator of the Data Science research group at the Computer Science and Engineering Dept […]

June 6th, 2017

Maram Hasanain: SIGIR Student Liaison!

My Ph.D student Maram Hasanain has been selected as SIGIR Student Liaison (for the Middle East region) among only 6 students worldwide. […]

May 18th, 2017

Gave a “How to Give a (Research) Talk” talk at QU!

I have given a “How to Give a (Research) Talk” talk at the CSE dept seminar series today at QU. […]

February 13th, 2017

Teaching Data Science course this fall!

I’m proud to be the first to teach a “Data Science” course in Qatar this Fall at Qatar University! Starting […]

January 9th, 2017

In the news: Our historic TREC success!

Our historic 1st rank at TREC 2016 was featured heavily in the local news today! Articles were written in Gulf […]

January 8th, 2017

“QU at TREC .. A Success Story”: an article at CSE newsletter!

I have contributed an article that is featured in the first issue of CSE newsletter about our team’s success story […]

December 31st, 2016

Maram Hasanain: SIGIR Ambassador at ACM Turing Award 50-Years Celebration

My perspective PhD student Maram Hasanain has been selected among 10 students from all over the world to represent ACM […]

November 30th, 2016

In the news: our HComp best paper!

Our HComp 2016 best paper award has been featured in a news release: https://www.ischool.utexas.edu/news/professor-lease-wins-hcomp-2016-best-paper-award  

November 16th, 2016

Our team achieved a historic 1st rank at TREC 2016 !!!

Our bigIR (representing QU) team has been ranked first at TREC (Text REtrieval Conference) 2016 international research competition in the […]

November 1st, 2016

Best paper award at HCOMP 2016!

Our paper titled “Why Is That Relevant? Collecting Annotator Rationales for Relevance Judgments” has been awarded “Best Paper Award” at […]

August 3rd, 2016

Full paper accepted @ HComp 2016 !

Our full paper titled “Why Is That Relevant? Collecting Annotator Rationales for Relevance Judgments” co-authored with Tyler Mcdonnell and Matt Lease (University […]

July 18th, 2016

EveTAR is released!

Our test collection for Arabic event detection in Twitter has just been released. Please check it out here!

May 17th, 2016

Gave a talk at SMNews Workshop, ICWSM’16

I have given a talk at Social Media in the Newsroom (SMNews) workshop held at ICWSM’16 conference in Cologne, Germany, […]

May 14th, 2016

Our papers @ SIGIR 2016

Hind Almerekhi, Maram Hasanain, and Tamer Elsayed. EveTAR: A New Test Collection for Event Detection in Arabic Tweets. Proceedings of […]

April 27th, 2016

2 students got SIGIR travel grants!

Reem Suwaileh (MSc student) and Maram Hasanain (PhD student) have been selected to get SIGIR travel grant to support their […]

December 3rd, 2015

Talk at AIRS 2015

Gave a talk at AIRS 2015 at Brisbane, Australia on our accepted paper “Detecting Automatically-Generated Arabic Tweets”.

November 24th, 2015

Journal article accepted at IP&M!

My journal article jointly authored with Walid Magdy and titled “Unsupervised Adaptive Microblog Filtering for Broad Dynamic Topics” has finally been accepted […]

November 18th, 2015

Ranked 2nd at TREC-2015 real-time filtering track!

QU team is ranked 2nd at TREC’15 microblog track, real-time filtering task (scenario A) among 14 participating international teams!! The team includes […]

September 2nd, 2015

“Big Data” course approved!

My proposed “Big Data Analytics” PhD course has been approved and is offered in Fall 2015. It’s the first ever […]

September 1st, 2015

New postdoc joining the team!

Mucahid Kutlu has joined my research team as a PostDoc.