Conjugator

A conjugator is a tool, program, or service that automatically generates the inflected forms of verbs according to the rules of a given language. It enables users to obtain correct conjugations for specified tenses, moods, voices, persons, and numbers, and can provide related forms such as participles or gerunds. Conjugators are used in language learning, grammar reference works, and natural language processing systems.

Conjugators operate using various approaches. Rule-based systems encode complete or partial verb paradigms and apply morphology rules to produce forms, including irregular verbs. Finite-state transducers and other structured models may be employed to map infinitives to finite forms. Data-driven approaches, including statistical models and neural networks, generate conjugations from large corpora, especially for languages with rich morphology or scarce rule coverage. Hybrid systems combine rules with learned components to handle exceptions.

Conjugators support languages with different morphological profiles. Analytic languages like English have relatively small sets of conjugations, while highly inflected languages such as Spanish, French, German, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, or Finnish require many forms. A high-quality tool will include irregular verb lists, diacritic handling, and context-sensitive choices of tense and mood. Example: in Spanish, hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, habláis, hablan.

In addition to education, conjugators are embedded in dictionaries, grammar checkers, machine translation, voice assistants, and spelling or grammar tools. They may provide APIs for developers or be offered as standalone applications. The term conjugator derives from conjugation, the process of forming verb inflections.