Generating Verb Conjugations

Written by on September 29, 2019 in Natural Language Processing, Programming, Prolog with 0 Comments

We have been taught in school that English language has different “tense” forms. To help you quickly recollect, I am listing them in the table below (the verb ‘sleep’ is used as example):

No.

Tense Form

Example Sentence (3rd Person Singular Pronoun)

1 Simple Present She sleeps
2 Simple Past She slept
3 Simple Future She will sleep
4 Present Continuous She is sleeping
5 Past Continuous She was sleeping
6 Future Continuous She will be sleeping
7 Present Perfect She has slept
8 Past Perfect She had slept
9 Future Perfect She will have slept
10 Present Perfect Continuous She has been sleeping
11  Past Perfect Continuous She had been sleeping
12  Future Perfect Continuous She will have been sleeping
13 Conditional Simple She would sleep
14 Conditional Perfect She would have slept
15 Conditional Continuous She would be sleeping
16 Conditional Perfect Continuous She would have been sleeping

The above table gives examples for the verb “sleep” as applied to “3rd Person Singular” pronoun. When we “conjugate” a verb, we change its form so that it matches the required Tense, Person and Number. Take the verb “sleep” used in the table above.

Case 1: 

Tense = Present Continuous

Person = First Person

Number = Singular

The conjugation of “sleep” gives “am sleeping”.

Case 2:

Tense = Present Continuous

Person = First Person

Number = Plural

The conjugation of “sleep” gives “are sleeping”.

Case 3:

Tense = Present Continuous

Person = Second Person

Number = Singular/Plural

The conjugation of “sleep” gives “are sleeping”.

Case 4:

Tense = Present Continuous

Person = Third Person

Number = Singular

The conjugation of “sleep” gives “is sleeping”.

Case 5:

Tense = Present Continuous

Person = Third Person

Number = Plural

The conjugation of “sleep” gives “are sleeping”.

I hope you get the idea. For more details, go through a good book on English grammar.

One of the interesting features I have built into my “iLexicon” system is the automatic generation of verb forms depending on the <Verb, Tense, Person, Number > quadruple. In today’s article, I would like to show examples of this functionality.

Have a look at the following session:

Conjugation Example

Conjugation Example

Here “p1”, “p2” and “p3” stand for 1st Person, 2nd Person and 3rd Person respectively. The term “c1” denotes “singular” number. The last argument of the predicate will be bound to the conjugated (generated) form of the verb.

It will be convenient if we can generate the conjugated forms of a verb for all the 16 tenses listed in the earlier table. Here is the code fragment (written in Sicstus Prolog) that does this:

Prolog Code Fragment

Prolog Code Fragment

Let us apply this to:

Verb = sleep

Person = 3rd Person

Number = Singular

Tense = All the 16 tenses

Here is what we get:

Full Conjugation - Example1

Full Conjugation – Example1

For our next example, let us consider:

Verb = eat

Person = 3rd Person

Number = Plural

Tense = All the 16 tenses

Here is the corresponding output:

Full Conjugation - Example2

Full Conjugation – Example2

For the third and final example,

Verb = sing

Person = 1st Person

Number = Singular

Tense = All the 16 tenses

And here is the output generated by the system:

Full Conjugation - Example3

Full Conjugation – Example3

As you can see, “iLexicon” is capable of conjugating verbs correctly. This is really important when we are interested in generating complete sentences, and that is one of the larger goals of this project.

Watch this space for many more interesting aspects of “iLexicon”. And have a nice weekend!

 

 

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