  With the continuing spread of misinformation and disinformation online, it is
of increasing importance to develop combating mechanisms at scale in the form
of automated systems that support multiple languages. One task of interest is
claim veracity prediction, which can be addressed using stance detection with
respect to relevant documents retrieved online. To this end, we present our new
Arabic Stance Detection dataset (AraStance) of 910 claims from a diverse set of
sources comprising three fact-checking websites and one news website. AraStance
covers false and true claims from multiple domains (e.g., politics, sports,
health) and several Arab countries, and it is wellbalanced between related and
unrelated documents with respect to the claims. We benchmark AraStance, along
with two other stance detection datasets, using a number of BERTbased models.
Our best model achieves an accuracy of 85% and a macro F1 score of 78%, which
leaves room for improvement and reflects the challenging nature of AraStance
and the task of stance detection in general.
