Unni Cathrine Eiken February 2005

occur with. Arguments which are unlikely to represent relevant and interesting information for
our classification are therefore omitted. In cases where a verbal predicate takes a nominal clause
or a sentence as its argument, it is unlikely that the predicate selects the argument based on (for
us) semantically interesting selectional restrictions. A verb can show restrictions in the selection
of an argument, presenting us with the possibility of saying something about this argument
relevant to the environment it occurs in. The same restrictions cannot be expected to apply in the
cases where the verb takes a sentence as its argument. As a consequence of this, the meaning
representations are limited to dealing with arguments which can be represented by single
symbols and which do not refer to clauses or sentences.
In order to extract all EPAS present in the texts, it will also be necessary to extract non-verbal
predicates. These will generally speaking correspond to adjective-noun combinations in the text.
This way, phrases of the type “the statement is important” or “the important statement” will both
produce the following EPAS:
(3- 10)
Predicate Argument 1 Argument 2
important statement ?
The process of extracting the EPAS is a challenging part of the project, especially since the
available tools for Norwegian are not robust enough to make this a trivial and straightforward
task. Regardless of which method is used to extract the EPAS, it is evident that large part of the
work on this project must be dedicated to the development of a suitable method for the
extraction of them. For several reasons, it is desirable to develop an extraction method that is as
automatic as possible. Most importantly, such a method saves a lot of time, but another
important aspect is that more manual extraction methods easily could become subjective and
less systematically concise. The next two sections will discuss the task of extracting the EPAS in
more detail.
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