ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Sentiment Swapping in Dialectal Arabic: Dataset Construction and
Model Performance Analysis
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1
Information & Computer Science, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Saudi Arabia
2
SDAIA-KFUPM
JRC for Artificial Intelligence, King Fahd University of
Petroleum & Minerals, Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia
Submission date: 2025-11-29
Final revision date: 2026-04-19
Acceptance date: 2026-08-22
Publication date: 2026-09-27
Corresponding author
Osamah Esam Alnahari
Information & Computer Science, King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, 31261, DHAHRAN, Saudi Arabia
Journal of Undergraduate Research International 2026;2(3A):61-69
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ABSTRACT
In this study, we examine sentiment swapping in Arabic dialects utilizing large language models (LLMs), which is a task that requires
the reversal of sentiment polarity while preserving meaning and dialect. Five Arabic sentiment datasets were filtered and validated
to construct a high-quality dialectal corpus, and multiple 7B to 13B models were evaluated under zero- and five-shot prompts.
The results indicate that few-shot examples consistently improve performance across all models. Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct achieved
the strongest sentiment inversion, whereas ALLaM-7B-Instruct-preview demonstrated the best dialect preservation and semantic
similarity. Overall performance remained moderate, highlighting the difficulty of polarity-controlled rewriting in dialectal Arabic.
This study provides a benchmark for future Arabic generative natural language processing research, as well as a carefully selected
sentiment-swapped dataset.