Arabic Language Characteristics that Make its Automatic Processing Challenging

Arabic Natural Language Processing (ANLP) is an area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that enables computers to process and understand Arabic text and speech. It powers applications such as translation, sentiment analysis, and speech recognition, opening new horizons. However, despite the worldwide popularity of Arabic, ANLP is lagging. The Arabic language possesses unique linguistic features that complicate computational processing. In this context, our article seeks to explore these challenges and examine Arabic’s inherent characteristics in orthography, morphology, grammar, syntax, and linguistic diversity, which contribute to the complexities of its Natural Language Processing (NLP). Indeed, the main challenges are the diversity of dialects, the morphological and syntactic richness of Arabic, diglossia, and the absence of short vowels. In addition, the scarcity of Arabic resources further complicates NLP efforts. This review can serve as a guide for practitioners in the field of Arabic NLP, whether they are computer scientists or linguists. It also calls on the Arab community scientists to take steps to meet the potential challenges and increase efforts in the field to promote Arabic NLP