Unni Cathrine Eiken February 2005

3.4 Altering the source
As already mentioned, parsing randomly selected Norwegian texts is not an entirely
straightforward task. Although NorGram provides for a quite broad grammar, not all linguistic
constructions are parsed and, more importantly, not all words are covered in the lexicon. Ideally,
it would be desirable to collect a limited domain treebank consisting of parsed sentences of the
original texts as I found them on the internet. In practice, this was not a feasible task. It early
became evident that the texts to be analyzed would have to be simplified for practical reasons.
For the purpose of classification, I needed to extract the EPAS present in the texts. All the other
information that was included in every sentence was not essential or necessary for the project.
Although aware that it would be more scientific, and in any respect better, to extract the EPAS
from original texts that have not been tampered with by me, this was not possible within the
framework of this thesis. Given that I would have to simplify the texts in any case, I decided to
cut most information that was irrelevant for the extraction of the (most central) EPAS. This
process was performed on alle sentences in the text collection. Mainly adverbial phrases were
excluded, on the basis that they would not be included in the extracted EPAS in any case. The
examples in (3-11) below illustrate a typical example:
(3- 11)
a. Original sentence:
Etter at hun ble funnet opplyste et vitne at hun hadde hørt
høye rop om hjelp fra stedet tidlig søndag morgen.
After she was found a witness informed that she had heard loud screams for
help from the area early Sunday morning.
b. Simplified form:
Et vitne opplyste at hun hadde hørt høye rop.
A witness informed that she had heard loud screams.
c. Extracted structures:
høre,vitne,rop
høy,rop,?
opplyse,vitne,?
hear, witness, scream
loud, scream,?
inform, witness,?
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