Dekonjugationen

Dekonjugationen, or deconjugation, is the linguistic process of converting a verb form that has been inflected for person, number, tense, mood, aspect, voice, or other grammatical categories back to its base form, usually the infinitive or lemma.

In practice, deconjugation is used in linguistic analysis and natural language processing to recover canonical verb forms from surface forms. It is closely related to lemmatization and to stemming, though deconjugation emphasizes returning a dictionary form rather than merely a stem.

Approaches to deconjugation include rule-based methods that encode language-specific conjugation patterns, dictionary-based methods that map surface forms to lemmas, or hybrid systems that combine both. Challenges include irregular verbs whose forms do not follow predictable patterns, homographs with multiple possible lemmas, and multiword or auxiliary constructions where context determines the base form (for example, English "is going" or "has gone").

Examples:

- German: geht -> gehen; ging -> gehen; gegangen -> gehen.

- English: going -> go; went -> go; eaten -> eat.

- Spanish: hablando -> hablar; comido -> comer.

Limitations arise because surface forms can be ambiguous or context-dependent, and some languages exhibit extensive irregularity or productive derivation. Dekonjugationen is a core step in tasks such as lexicon building, machine translation, information retrieval, and morphological analysis.

See also: Lemmatization; Morphology; Inflection; Stemming; Part-of-speech tagging.