Verbbound

Verbbound is a formal framework and accompanying software toolkit designed for modeling the behavior of verbs in natural languages. It provides a unified representation for verb lemmas, inflected forms, argument structure, and semantic roles, with an emphasis on how verbal morphology binds across syntactic frames. The project aims to support cross-linguistic analysis as well as practical NLP applications such as parsing, machine translation, and lexical resource development.

Conceptually, verbbound treats verbs as bound nodes whose form is determined by a set of morphosyntactic features. A verb entry includes a lemma, a stem or stem-alternants, and a collection of inflectional templates. Each template encodes information about tense, aspect, mood, voice, negation, polarity, and agreement, as well as irregularities and suppletions. The framework also records subcategorization frames, valency information, and semantic role mappings for typical arguments such as agent, patient, and theme.

Verbbound specifies a data model and a serialization format to enable interchange between lexicons, grammars, and processing tools. The standard favors a JSON-based schema with explicit feature keys and versioned schemas, along with validation tools and reference implementations in multiple programming languages. It is designed for extensibility to accommodate agglutinative, fusional, and isolating language types.

Since its initial release, verbbound has been used in linguistic research and in NLP pipelines that require precise alignment between morphology and syntax. It supports educational resources by providing clear representations of verb inflection and argument structures, and it aids machine translation efforts by standardizing how verbs connect to sentential context.

Verbbound is developed by the Verbbound Consortium and is released under an open license. It is maintained through community contributions, periodic refinements of the schema, and compatibility with existing lexical databases. The project emphasizes interoperability, extensibility, and transparent documentation to facilitate adoption across disciplines.