[NLP] Detecting verbs

What's a simple algorithm (simple == no academia robodick sucking neural network bullshit) to pretty consistently find a verb in a given sentence? I wish to create a bot. I'm thinking of using a dictionary, I just don't know how to work out the details.

the best way of finding verbs is probably by having a search tree or hash set based on a dictinoary of verbs. the best way of finding a predicate would be automatically constructing a sentence diagram based on a given sentence, which is significantly more complex - but there are libraries for that (see https://www.abisource.com/projects/link-grammar/)