Is there a computer program/script that can match a verb with its various conjugations?

Question

For example, matching "protest" with "protested", "protesting", "protests", and also matching less regular conjugations, like "run", "ran", "running" and "grab", "grabbed", "grabbed".

If there were such a function in JavaScript or something, that would be nice. But I'm looking for a tool that does this - I would think exists.

Thanks in advance. (If you have things remotely similar, please share, too.)

My ultimate goal is to match my data, which is a bunch of verbs, with a given (huge) corpus that has a variety of verbs conjugated in various ways.

Answer 1

The easiest way to do this is to lemmatize your corpus. You have to use a program or library that does this for you. I know of freeling, but there are many more out there. It depends on what programming language you want to use. The advantage of freeling is that it allows you to use it from various languages like java, perl, python, etc.

After you have your corpus lemmatized, it will look like this:

I loved her blue shoes -> I <lemma=I> loved <lemma=love> her <lemma=his> blue <lemma=blue> shoes <lemma=shoe>
I love his blue shoe

Of course the format will vary, and some details too, but the main idea is that you'll get the stem of the words. Then, you can match your list of verbs against the lemmas in the corpus.

Answer 2

It seems like a similar question was asked elsewhere: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8424806/verb-conjugations-database

I think I am settling on using http://www.online-languages.info/english/irregular_verbs.php?l=1 - copying it's content to a text file, and then parsing that.