iverb

Iverb is a term used in linguistics and language technology to denote a framework, dataset, or software component dedicated to modeling verb morphology across languages. It is not tied to a single product or standard, but rather refers to a family of approaches and resources intended to describe, store, and generate verb forms in a consistent way. In its broad sense, iverb encompasses data models for tense, aspect, mood, voice, person, and number, as well as cross-linguistic agreement, subcategorization frames, and valency information used by parsers and generators.

Typical implementations of iverb are language-agnostic at the design level, while allowing language-specific rule sets to be layered on top. Data encoded for iverb are commonly stored in structured formats such as JSON or XML, enabling interoperability with morphological analyzers, synthesizers, and language-learning applications. Software libraries that provide iverb components offer APIs to query conjugations, generate inflected forms, and validate paradigm completeness, supporting both research and applied linguistic tasks.

Origins and status: The concept of iverb emerged in the international computational linguistics community as a practical approach to sharing and reusing verb morphology data. There is no single authoritative specification or universally adopted implementation as of the mid-2020s, and projects that reference iverb often diverge in data models and tooling. This reflects the diverse needs of researchers, educators, and developers working with complex verb systems.

Applications and related concepts: Iverb is used in language documentation, natural language processing pipelines, machine translation, and language-learning tools. Related concepts include verb morphology, morphology databases, paradigm dictionaries, and finite-state or rule-based approaches to inflection.