mucAI at BAREC Shared Task 2025: Towards Uncertainty Aware Arabic Readability Assessment

We present a simple, model-agnostic post-processing technique for fine-grained Arabic readability classification in the BAREC 2025 Shared Task (19 ordinal levels). Our method applies conformal prediction to generate prediction sets with coverage guarantees, then computes weighted averages using softmax renormalized probabilities over the conformal sets. This uncertainty-aware decoding improves Quadratic Weighted Kappa (QWK) by reducing high-penalty misclassifications to nearer levels. Our approach shows consistent QWK improvements of 1-3 points across dif- ferent base models. In the strict track, our sub- mission achieves QWK scores of 84.9%(test) and 85.7% (blind test) for sentence level, and 73.3% for document level. For Arabic educational assessment, this enables human reviewers to focus on a handful of plausible levels, combining statistical guarantees with practical usability.

In Proceedings of the Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference