AbjadStyleTransfer: Shared Task on Authorship Style Transfer (Text Generation)

Hosted with AbjadNLP(2026) at EACL 2026, Rabat, Morocco

1. Overview of the Shared Task

AbjadStyleTransfer focuses on Authorship Style Transfer (Text Generation) for languages that use the Arabic script, including Modern Standard Arabic and Urdu. The goal is to transform a formal input text into the style of a specified author while preserving semantics, with a strict focus on literature.

Unlike general text style analysis, Authorship Style Transfer (AST) aims to actively modify text to conform to a distinctive writing style. This shared task seeks to promote research in AST for Arabic-script languages, an area that remains relatively underdeveloped.

2. Motivation

Authorship style transfer has applications in education, cultural preservation, and content generation. The Arabic script is used by diverse languages with rich literary traditions. This task addresses challenges such as:

• Linguistic diversity: Covering MSA and Urdu.
• Complex Morphology: Handling the rich morphology of these languages.
• Style Preservation: Capturing the nuances of literary styles.

3. Data

The dataset focuses on literature from prominent authors in the target languages.

• Source: Literary works (novels, essays, etc.).
• Task: Transform formal text into the style of these authors.

4. Task Description

AbjadStyleTransfer

• Goal: Transform a formal input text into the style of a specified author while preserving semantics.
• Scope: Literature in Modern Standard Arabic, Urdu, Persian, and Kurdish.
• Evaluation: BLEU, chrF

5. Tentative Timeline

• December 25, 2025: Release of training data
• January 10, 2026: Release of test data
• January 15, 2026: End of evaluation cycle (test submissions close)
• January 17, 2026: Final results released
• January 21, 2025: Shared task papers due date
• January 27, 2026: Notification of acceptance
• February 3, 2026: Camera-ready versions due
• March 24–29, 2026: Workshop Dates [TBD]

6. Organizers’ Details

• Shadi Abudalfa, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals
• Saad Ezzini, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals
• Ahmed Abdelali, HUMAIN
• Mustafa Jarrar, Hamad Bin Khalifa University / Birzeit University
• Mo El-Haj, VinUniversity
• Nadir Durrani, HBKU
• Hassan Sajjad, Dalhousie University
• Farah Adeeba, University of Massachusetts Amherst

7. Participation Guidelines

• Access the following links on Codabench platform to access the datasets and train/evalaute the perfomance of your system/model:
  • MSA
  • Urdu
• For participation guidelines, please refer to Participation Guidelines.
• Comprehensive instructions for preparing and submitting your paper(s) are available at Paper Submission Guidelines.

References

1. Hu et al. “Text style transfer: A review and experimental evaluation.” ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 24(1), 2022.
2. Shao et al. “Authorship style transfer with inverse transfer data augmentation.” AI Open, 5, 2024.
3. Patel et al. “Low-Resource Authorship Style Transfer: Can Non-Famous Authors Be Imitated?” arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.08986, 2022.
4. Horvitz et al. “TinyStyler: Efficient Few-Shot Text Style Transfer with Authorship Embeddings.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.15586, 2024.

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Logistics and Support

• Website Hosting: GitHub Pages
• Submission System: Codabench
• Communication Channels:
  • Slack workspace
  • Mailing list
  • GitHub repository
• Regular updates and participant support

Stay Updated

• Official GitHub Repository: https://github.com/ezzini/AraGenEval
• Join our Slack community

Announcements and Updates

• The final phase will begin on July 20, 2025 (UTC-12h) and will run for 5 days, ending on July 25, 2025 (UTC-12h). During this time, each team must submit their predictions on the test set (not the validation set) via the Codabench system. Only submissions made within this timeframe will be considered as official contributions when submitting your papers to the OpenReview system.
• The main content of your paper should not exceed 4 pages. There is no page limit on appendices and references; these sections are excluded from the 4-page limit.

Anti-Harassment policy

We uphold the ACL Anti-Harassment Policy, and participants in this shared task are encouraged to reach out with any concerns or questions to any of the shared task organizers.