Survey on common Arabic language forms from a speech recognition point of view

Though Arabic language is a widely spoken language, research done in the area of automatic speech recognition for Arabic is very limited compared to other same rank languages like Mandarin. Here we are highlighting the main characteristics of different Arabic forms from a speech recognition point of view, mainly on the acoustic and language level. The characteristics discussed are Arabic phonetics, diacritization problem, grapheme-tophoneme, and morphological complexity. The Arabic forms discussed in this paper are: classical Arabic, modern standard Arabic, and Egyptian colloquial Arabic. The main purpose of this paper is to summarize main problems in Arabic speech recognition in one paper so researchers in this field can use it as one reference.