Bilingual Hebrew-English Generation of Possessives and 
Partitives: Raising the Input Abstraction Level 
Yael Dahan Netzer and Michael Elhadad 
Ben Gurion University 
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Beer Sheva, 84105, Israel 
(yaeln I elhadad) @cs. bgu. ac. il 
Abstract 
Syntactic realization grammars have tradi- 
tionally attempted to accept inputs with the 
highest possible level of abstraction, in or- 
der to facilitate the work of the compo- 
nents (sentence planner) preparing the in- 
put. Recently, the search for higher ab- 
straction has been, however, challenged (E1- 
hadad and Robin, 1996)(Lavoie and Ram- 
bow, 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 pos- 
sessives in a bilingual Hebrew-English gen- 
eration 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 lan- 
guage. 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 par- 
titives in Hebrew and English and conclude 
by presenting an input specification for com- 
plex 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. 
1 Introduction 
One of the first issues to address when se- 
lecting a syntactic realization component 
is whether its input specification language 
fits the desired application. Traditionally, 
syntactic realization components have at- 
tempted to raise the abstraction level of in- 
put specifications for two reasons: (1) to pre- 
serve the possibility of paraphrasing and (2) 
to make it easy for the sentence planner to 
map from semantic data to syntactic input 
As new applications appear, that can- 
not start generation from a semantic in- 
put because such an input is not available 
(for example re-generation of sentences from 
syntactic fragments to produce summaries 
(Barzilay et al., 1999) or generation of com- 
plex NPs in a hybrid template system for 
business letters (Gedalia, 1996)), this moti- 
vation has lost some of its strength. Con- 
sequently, "shallow surface generators" have 
recently appeared (Lavoie and Rambow, 
1997) (Busemann and Horacek, 1998) that 
require an input considerably less abstract 
than those required by more traditional re- 
alization components such as SURGE (E1- 
hadad and Robin, 1996) or KPML (Bate- 
man, 1997). 
In this paper, we contribute to the de- 
bate on selecting an appropriate level of ab- 
straction by considering the case of bilin- 
gual generation. We present results ob- 
tained while developing the HUGG syntactic 
realization component for Hebrew (Dahan- 
Netzer, 1997). One of the goals of this sys- 
tem is to design a generator with an input 
specification language as similar as possible 
to that of an English generator, SURGE in 
our case. 
The ideal scenario for bilingual generation 
is illustrated in Figure 1. It consists of the 
144 
John gave a book to Mary 
John natan sefer le-Mary 
cat 
proc 
partic 
:lause 
type relation-type 
agent 
affected 
possessor 
possessed 
composite \] possessive 
lex 'John' gender masculine 
\[cat proper \] \[1\] lex 'Mary' 
gender feminine \[1\] 
cat common \] lex 'book/sefer' 
Figure 1" Ideal scenario for bilingual gener- 
ation 
following steps: 
1. Prepare an input specification in one 
language 
2. Translate all the lexical entries (func- 
tion words do not appear) 
3. Generate with any grammar 
In the example, the same input structure 
is used and the generator can produce sen- 
tences in both languages if only the lexical 
items are translated. 
Consider the following paraphrase in En- 
glish for the same input: John gave Mary a 
book. 
The Hebrew grammar does not produce 
such a paraphrase, as there is no equivalent 
in Hebrew to the dative move alternation. 
In this case, we conclude that the input ab- 
straction level is appropriate. In contrast, 
if the input had specified a structure such as 
indirect-object(prep=to/le, np--Mary), then 
it would not have been abstract enough to 
serve as a bilingual input structure. 
Similarly, the English possessive marker is 
very close to the Hebrew "construct state" 
(smixut): 
The King's palace 
Armon ha-melex 
Palace-cs the-king 
The following input structure seems, 
therefore, appropriate for both languages: 
lex 
possessor 
common 1 "palace" / "armon" 
\[leXdefinite yes"king"/"melex"\] 
There are, however, divergences between 
the use of smixut in Hebrew and of the pos- 
sessive marker in English: 
Segovia's pupil The pupil of Segovia 
* talmyd segovyah talmyd Sel segovyah 
? The house's windows The windows of the house 
Haionot ha-bayit ha-Halonot Sel ha-bayit 
Our goal, therefore, is to design an input 
structure that is abstract enough to let the 
grammar decide whether to use a possessive 
marker vs. an of-construct in English or a 
Sel-construct vs. a smixut-construction in 
Hebrew. 
A similar approach has been adopted in 
generation (Bateman, 1997), (Bateman et 
al., 1991) and in machine translation most 
notably in (Dorr, 1994). Dorr focuses on di- 
vergences at the clause level as illustrated by 
the following example: 
I like Mary 
Maria me gusta a mi 
Mary pleases me 
Dorr selects a representation structure 
based on Jackendoff's Lexical Conceptual 
Structures (LCS) (Jackendoff, 1990). 
In the KPML system, the proposed so- 
lution is based on the systemic notion of 
"delicacy" and the assumption is that low- 
delicacy input features (the most abstract 
ones) remain common to the two target lan- 
guages and high-delicacy features would dif- 
fer. 
In this paper, we focus on the input spec- 
ification for complex NPs. The main reason 
for this choice is that the input for NPs in 
SURGE has remained close to English syn- 
tax (low abstraction). It consists of the fol- 
lowing main sub-constituents: head, classi- 
tier, describer, qualifier and determiner. 
In previous work (Elhadad, 1996), we dis- 
cuss how to map a more abstract domain- 
specific representation to the SURGE input 
145 
structure within a sentence planner. When 
moving to a bilingual generator, we have 
found the need for a higher level of ab- 
straction to avoid encoding language-specific 
knowledge in the sentence planners. We 
specifically discuss here the following deci- 
sions: 
• How to realize a possessive relation: 
John's shirt vs. the shirt of John 
• How to realize a partitive relation: all 
the kids vs. all of the kids 
In the rest of the paper, we first present 
basic contrastive data and existing analyses 
about possessives and partitives in Hebrew 
and English. We then present the input fea- 
tures we have designed to cover possessives 
and partitives in both languages and discuss 
how these features are used to account for 
the main decisions required of the realizer. 
We conclude by an evaluation of the bilin- 
gual input structure on a set of 100 sample 
input structures for complex NPs in the two 
languages and of the divergences that remain 
in the generated NPs. In conclusion, this 
bilingual analysis has helped us identify im- 
portant abstractions that lead to more fluent 
generation in both languages. 
2 Possessives and Partitives in 
Hebrew and English 
This section briefly presents data on posses- 
sives and partitives in English and Hebrew. 
These observations delimit the questions we 
address in the paper: when is a genitive con- 
struct used to express possessives and when 
is an explicit partitive used. 
2.1 Possessives in English 
Possessives can be realized in two basic 
structures: as part of the determiner se- 
quence (Halliday, 1994) (as either a pos- 
sessive pronoun or a full NP marked with 
apostrophe-s as a genitive marker) or as a 
construct NP of NP. 
In addition to possessive, the genitive 
marker can realize several semantic relations 
(Quirk et al., 1985) (pp.192-203): subjec- 
tive genitive (the boy's application --the boy 
applied) , genitive of origin (the girl's story 
-- the girl told a story), objective genitive, 
descriptive genitive (a women's college -- a 
college for woman). 
As a consequence of this versatility, the 
general decision of apostrophe vs. of is 
not trivial: Quirk claims that the higher 
on the gender scale, i.e., the more animate 
the noun, the more the possessor realization 
tends to be realized as an inflected genitive: 
• Person's name: Segovia's pupil 
• Person's nouns: the boy's new shirt 
• Collective nouns: the nation's social se- 
curity 
• Higher Animals: the horse's neck 
• Geographical names: Europe's future 
• Locative nouns: the school's history 
• Temporal nouns: the decade's event 
This decision also interacts with other re- 
alization decisions: if several modifiers must 
be attached to the same head, they can com- 
pete for the same slot in the syntactic struc- 
ture. In such cases, the decision is one of 
preference ranking: The boy's application of 
last year vs. last year's application of the 
boy. 
2.2 Possessives in Hebrew 
Possessives in Hebrew can be realized by 
three syntactic constructions: 
construct state 
cadur ha-tynok 
ball the-baby 
free genitive 
ha-cadur Sel ha-tynok 
the ball of the baby 
double genitive 
cadur-o Sel ha-tynok 
ball-his of the-baby 
The construct state (called smixut) is 
similar to the apostrophe marker in En- 
glish: it involves a noun adjacent to an- 
other noun or noun phrase, without any 
marker (like a preposition) between them 
(Berman, 1978). The head noun in the con- 
struct form generally undergoes morpholog- 
ical changes: yaldah - yaldat. Smixut is, on 
the one hand, very productive in Hebrew and 
yet very constrained (Dahan-Netzer and E1- 
hadad, 1998b). 
146 
Free genitive constructs use a preposi- 
tional phrase with the preposition Sel. Many 
studies treat Sel as a case marker only 
(cf. (Berman, 1978) (Yzhar, 1993) (Borer, 
1988)). 
The choice of one of the three forms seems 
to be stylistic and vary in spoken and writ- 
ten Hebrew (cf. (Berman, 1978), (Glin- 
eft, 1989), (Ornan, 1964), and discussion 
in (Seikevicz, 1979)). But, in addition to 
these pragmatic factors and as is the case for 
the English genitive, the construct state can 
realize a wide variety of semantic relations 
(Dahan-Netzer and Elhadad, 1998b), (Azar, 
1985), (Levi, 1976). The selection is also 
a matter of preference ranking among com- 
petitors for the same syntactic slot. For ex- 
ample, we have shown in (Dahan-Netzer and 
Elhadad, 1998b) that the semantic relations 
that can be realized by a construct state 
are the ones defined as classifier in SURGE. 
Therefore, the co-occurrence of such a rela- 
tion with another classifier leads to a com- 
petition for the syntactic slot of "classifier" 
and also contributes to the decision of how 
to realize a possessive. 
Consider the following example: 
cat 
head 
classifier 
possessor 
common 
lex "Simlah"/"dress" \] 
lex "Sabat" \] 
cat common \] 
lex "yalda"/"girl" 
If only the possessor is provided in the fol- 
lowing input, it can be mapped to a con- 
struct state: 
Simlat ha-yaldah 
dress-cs the-girl 
the girl's dress 
If a classifier is provided in addition, 
the construct-state slot is not available 
anymore 1, and the free genitive construct 
must be used: 
Simlat ha-Sabat Sel ha-yaldah 
dress-cs the-Shabat of the-girl 
The Shabat dress of the girl 
l If the classifier had been specified in the input 
as a semantic relation as discussed in (Dahan-Netzer 
and Elhadad, 1998b), an alternative realization (The girl's dress/or Shabat) 
could have been obtained. 
2.3 Partitives in English 
The partitive relation denotes a subset of the 
thing to which the head of a noun phrase 
refers. A partitive relation can be realized in 
two main ways: as part of the pre-determiner 
sequence (Halliday, 1994), (Winograd, 1983) 
using quantifiers that have a partitive mean- 
ing (e.g., some/most/many/one-third (of 
the) children) or using a construction of the 
form a measure/X of Y. 
There are three subtypes of the parti- 
tive construction ((Quirk et al., 1985)\[p.130\], 
(Halliday, 1994)): measure a mile of cable, 
typical partitives a loaf of bread, a slice of 
cake, and general partitives: a piece/bit/of 
an item of X. 
In the syntactic structure of a partitive 
structure, the part is the head of the phrase 
(and determines agreement), but the Thing 
- is what is being measured. This creates 
an interesting difference ~)etween the logical 
and syntactic structure of the NP. 
(Mel'cuk and Perstov, 1987) defines the 
elective surface syntactic relation which con- 
nects an of-phrase to superlative adjectives 
or numerals. An elective phrase is an ellip- 
tical structure: the rightmost \[string\] of the 
strings. It can be headed by an adjective in 
superlative form (the poorest among the na- 
tion), a numeral (45 of these 256 sentences), 
ordinal (the second of three) or a quantita- 
tive word having the feature elect: all, most, 
some of... The elective relation can be used 
recursively (Many of the longest of the first 
45 of these 256 sentences). 
In the case of quantifier-partitives, one 
must decide whether to use an explicitly par- 
titive construct (some of the children) or not 
(some children). The structure that does 
not use of is used for generic NPs (when 
the head is non-definite: most children). For 
specific reference, the of-construction is op- 
tional with nouns and obligatory with pro- 
nouns: all (of) the meat 
all of it 
2.4 Partitives in Hebrew 
There are two possible ways to express par- 
titivity in Hebrew: using a construction of 
147 
the form X me-Y, or using a partitive quan- 
tifier. In contrast to English, quantifiers that 
are marked as partitive, cannot be used in an 
explicitly partitive structure: 
roy ha-yeladym - * roy me-ha-yeladym - most of the 
children 
Se'ar ha-yeladym - * Se'ar me-ha-yeladym - the rest of the 
children 
col ha-yeladym - * col me-ha-yeladym - all of the children 
Conversely, a quantifier that is not marked 
as partitive can be used in an explicitly par- 
titive structure: 
harbeh yeladym - many children 
harbeh me-hayeladym - many of the children 
mewat ha-yeladym - few the-children 
mewat me-ha-yeladym - few of the-children 
There are complex restrictions in Hebrew on 
the co-occurrence of several determiners in 
the same NP and on their relative order- 
ing within the NP. To explain them, Glin- 
ert (Glinert, 1989) adopts a functional per- 
spective, quite appropriate to the needs of 
a generation system, and identifies a general 
pattern for the NP, that we use as a basis for 
the mapping rules in HUGG: 
\[partitive determiner amount head 
classifiers describers 
post-det/quant qualifiers\] 
Yzhar and Doron (Doron, 1991) (Yzhar, 
1993) distinguish between two sets of deter- 
miners, that they call D and Q quantifiers. 
The distinction is based on syntactic fea- 
tures, such as position, ability to be modi- 
fied, ability to participate in partitive struc- 
tures and requirement to agree in number 
and gender with the head. This distinction 
is used to explain co-occurrence restrictions, 
the order of appearance of D vs Q quantifiers 
and the recursive structure of D determiners: 
D determiners can be layered on top of other 
D determiners. A single Q quantifier can oc- 
cur in an NP and it remains attached closest 
to the head. 
In (Dahan-Netzer, 1997) and (Dahan- 
Netzer and Elhadad, 1998a), we have refined 
the D/Q classification and preferred using 
functional criteria: we map the Q quanti- 
tiers to the "amount" category defined by 
Glinert, and the D set is split into the parti- 
tive and determiner categories - each with a 
different function. Of these, only partitives 
are recursive. 
Given these observations, the following de- 
cisions must be left "open" in the input to 
the realizer: how to map a possessor to dif- 
ferent realizations; in which order to place 
co-occurring quantifiers; and whether to use 
an explicit of construct for partitive quanti- 
tiers. The input specification language must 
also enforce that only acceptable recursive 
structures be expressible. 
3 Defining an Abstract Input 
for NP Realization 
3.1 Input Features 
The input structure for NPs we adopt is split 
in four groups of features, which appear in 
Figure 3.1: 
• Head or reference-set: defines the thing 
or set referred to by the NP 
• Qualifying: adds information to the 
thing 
• Identifying: identifies the thing among 
other possible referents 
• Quantifying: determines the quantity or 
amount of the thing. 
The main modifications from the existing 
SURGE input structure are the introduction 
of the re/-set feature and the update of the 
usage of the possessor feature. 
For both of these features, the main re- 
quirement on the realizer is to properly han- 
dle cases of "competition" for the same re- 
stricted syntactic slot, as illustrated in the 
Shabat dress example above. 
The possible realizations of pos- 
sessor are controlled by the feature 
realize-possessor-as free-genitive, 
bound or double-genitive. Defaults 
(unmarked cases) vary between the two 
languages and the co-occurrence constraints 
also vary, because each form is mapped to 
different syntactic slots. 
For example, a bound possessor is mapped 
to the determiner slot in English, while in 
Hebrew it is mapped to a classifier slot. 
148 
Qualifying features English Realization Hebrew Realization 
classifier Leather shoe nawal wor 
Electric chair cise' HaSmaly 
describer Pretty boy yeled yafeh 
qualifier A story about a cat sypur wal Hatul 
A story I read sypur S-kar'aty 
possessor The king's palace Armon ha-melez 
A palace of a king Armon Sel melez 
The book of his Armono Seio 
Identifying features 
distance That boy yeled zeh 
Ordinal The third child ha-yeled ha-SlySy 
status (deictic2) 
Definite yes/no 
Selective yes/no 
Total +/-/none 
The same child 
The/a book 
Some/D children 
All/No/~ children 
Quantifying features I 
Oto yeled 
(ha) seyer 
Total +/-/none 
Cardinal The three children 
Fraction 
Multiplier 
degree + 
degree- 
degree none 
comparative yes 
One-third o I the children 
Twice his weight 
(The) many ears 
A little butter 
Some children 
Mofl~ ears 
superlative yes The most cars 
evaluative yes Too many ears 
orientation- Few cars 
col hayeladym, A\] EHad me-ha-yeladym 
SloSet ha-yeladym 
SIyS me-ha-yeladym 
ciflaym miSkalo 
harbeh mezonyot, ha-mezonyot ha-rabot 
kZa T Hems 'h 
eamah yeladym 
yoter mezonyot 
roy ha-mezonyot 
yoter m-day mezonyot 
mewaT mezonyot 
Figure 2: Input features 
When possessives are realized as free gen- 
itives, they are mapped to the slot of qual- 
ifiers, usually in the front position. Boro- 
chovsky (Borochovsky, 1986) discusses ex- 
ceptions to this ordering rule in Hebrew: 
Vawadah l-wirwurym Sel ha-miSTarah 
The commission for.appeals of the-police 
* Vawadah Sel ha-MiSTarah l-wirwurym 
In this example, the purpose-modifier is 
"closer" semantically to the head than the 
possessor. The ordering decision must rely 
on semantic information (purpose) that is 
not available in our general input structure 
(cf. (Dahan-Netzer and Elhadad, 1998b) for 
an even more abstract proposal). 
Realization rules in each language take 
into account the restrictions on possible 
mappings for the possessor by unifying the 
feature realize-possessive-as based on 
the lexical properties of both the head and 
the possessor: 
Construct-state not ok for possessive rela- 
tion with proper name: 
? Simlat Hanah- ? dress-cs Hanah 
Double possessive ok for person names and 
possessor: 
Simlatah Sel Hanah - dress-cs-her of Hanah 
Double possessive not ok for non-possessive 
relation: 
* Simlatah Sel ha-Sabat 
* dress-cs-her of the-Shabat 
Similarly, the possible realizations of the 
partitive are controlled by the feature 
realize-partitive-as: of or quantifier. 
Quantifiers are classifed along the por- 
tion/amount dimension. This system can 
be realized either lexically by quantifiers 
marked as partitive, or by using an explicit 
partitive syntactic structure X rae-Y/X of 
Y. 
Because the realization grammar uses the 
knowledge of which word realizes which func- 
tion, the distinction among partitive quan- 
tifiers, amount quantifiers and determiners 
predicts the order of the words in the He- 
brew NP. The standard order is: 
\[partitive determiner amount head\] 
As noted above, only partitives can en- 
ter into recursive structures, in both Hebrew 
149 
and English. Accordingly, our input specifi- 
cation language enforces the constraint that 
only a single amount and a single identifica- 
tion feature can be present simultaneously. 
Whenever a partitive quantifier is desired, 
the input specification must include a ref-set 
feature instead of the head. This enforces 
the constraint that partitives yield recursive 
constructs, similarly to Mel'cuk's elective- 
relation. Such recursive structures are illus- 
trated in the following example: 
wasarah me-col ha-maffgynym 
ten off-all the-demonstrators 
Ten off all off the demonstrators 
cat np 
cardinal value 
total 
10 \] \[ ex 
ref-set ref-set definite yes 
The input is abstract enough to let the re- 
alization grammar decide whether to build 
an explicitly partitive construction. This de- 
cision depends on the lexical features of the 
realizing quantifiers and is different in En- 
glish and Hebrew, as discussed above. 
Additional realization rules take into ac- 
count additional co-occurrence restrictions. 
For example, in Hebrew, if the "portion" 
part is modified with adjectives, then an ex- 
plicitly partitive construction must be used: 
ha-roy ha-gadoi mi-beyn ha-yeladym 
the-most the-big of-from the-children 
The vast majority of the children 
In summary, we have presented a set of 
input features for complex NPs that include 
the abstract possessor and re.f-set features. 
These two features can be mapped to dif- 
ferent syntactic slots. Realization rules in 
the grammar control the mapping of these 
features based on complex co-occurrence re- 
strictions. They also take into account the 
lexical properties of specific quantifiers and 
determiners when deciding whether to use 
explicitly partitive constructions. Finally, 
the input structure enforces that only parti- 
tive relations can enter into recursive struc- 
tures. Both HUGG in Hebrew and SURGE 
in English have been adapted to support this 
modified input specification. 
4 Conclusion 
To evaluate whether the proposed input 
structure is appropriate as a bilingual spec- 
ification, we have tested our generation sys- 
tem on a set of 100 sample inputs for com- 
plex NPs in English and Hebrew. In the 
experiment, we only translated open-class 
lexical items, thus following the "ideal sce- 
nario" discussed in the Introduction. De- 
spite the divergences between their surface 
syntactic structure, the input structures pro- 
duced valid complex NPs in both languages 
in all cases. 
We identified the following open problems 
in the resulting sample: the selection of the 
unmarked realization option and the deter- 
mination of the default value of the definite 
feature remain difficult and vary a lot be- 
tween the two languages. 
This case study has demonstrated that the 
methodology of contrastive analysis of simi- 
lar semantic relations in two languages with 
dissimilar syntactic realizations is a fruitful 
way to define a well-founded input specifica- 
tion language for syntactic realization. 

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