Bilingual hebrew-english generation of possessives and partitives: raising the input abstraction level

Syntactic realization grammars have traditionally attempted to accept inputs with the highest possible level of abstraction, in order to facilitate the work of the components (sentence planner) preparing the input. Recently, the search for higher abstraction has been, however, challenged (E1-hadad and Robin, 1996)(Lavoie and Rambow, 1997)(Busemann and Horacek, 1998). In this paper, we contribute to the issue of selecting the "ideal" abstraction level in the input to syntactic realization grammar by considering the case of partitives and possessives in a bilingual Hebrew-English generation grammar. In the case of bilingual generation, the ultimate goal is to provide a single input structure, where only the open-class lexical entries are specific to the language. In that case, the minimal abstraction required must cover the different syntactic constraints of the two languages. We present a contrastive analysis of the syntactic realizations of possessives and partitives in Hebrew and English and conclude by presenting an input specification for complex NPs which is slightly more abstract than the one used in SURGE. We define two main features -possessor and rejLset, and •discuss how the grammar handles complex syntactic co-occurrence phenomena based on this input. We conclude by evaluating how the resulting input specification language is appropriate for both languages.