A Kaldi recipe for Arabic using the Tunisian_MSA  corpus.

Extra Requirements:
This recipe uses the QCRI lexicon which uses the Buckwalter encoding.
In order to convert the Buckwalter to utf-8, the Encode::Arabic::Buckwalter perl module is required.
On ubuntu install the package: libencode-arabic-perl.
On Mac OSX use cpanm (cpanminus) to install the perl module.

Description of the Tunisian_MSA Corpus
The Tunisian_MSA corpus was originally collected to train acoustic models for pronunciation modeling in Arabic language learning applications.
The data collection took place near Tunis the capital of the Republic of Tunisia in 2003 at the Military Academy of Fondouk Jedied . 
The Tunisian_MSA  corpus is divided into recited  and prompted speech  subcorpora.
The  recited speech appears under the recordings directory and the prompted speech under the answers directory.
Each of the 118 informants contributed to both subcorpora by reciting sentences and providing answers to prompted questions. 
The Tunisian_MSA corpus  has   11.2 hours of speech.

With the exception of speech from two speakers , all the corpus was used for training.

A small corpus was collected for testing.

A pronunciation dictionary is also available from openslrm.org.
It covers all the words uttered in the Tunisian_MSA corpus and the test corpus.
The QCRI lexicon was used as a starting point for writing this lexicon.
The phones are the same as those used in the QCRI lexicon.