Unni Cathrine Eiken February 2005

value and highly desirable. As such, it was a logical next step following the removal of
unwanted structures, to make sure that all desirable structures had been collected from the texts.
Several structures were added; many of which had been subjected to only partial extraction in
the extraction process. This may in part be due to the syntactic analysis and in part to the
matching by the Perl script. Further, EPAS were manually extracted from one additional text
that had not been parsed, and therefore not been part of the initial extraction process. In total,
this yielded 74 additional EPAS. The example in (3-24) below provides an example of a
manually edited EPAS. (3-24a) shows the EPAS as it was after the automatic extraction process.
While going through the texts, it became clear that this EPAS had not been extracted in a way
that represented the meaning in the sentence it originated from, and therefore did not have an
optimal structure. The EPAS was therefore manually modified to the form shown in (3-24b).
(3- 24)
a. Original EPAS:
ta, syklist, kontakt
make, biker, contact
b. Manually corrected EPAS:
ta-kontakt-med, syklist, politi
make-contact-with, biker, police
Appendix C contains the EPAS list, while Appendix D shows the alignment between sentences
in the text and the extracted EPAS.
3.6.4 Comments about the EPAS list
The revised EPAS list consists of 223 elementary predicate-argument structures. 24 structures
have been modified as described above, and 74 have been added. The list contains most EPAS
present in the text collection and represents a list of verb-subject-object relations found within a
limited thematic domain. While it is clear that the list could have been expanded by adding
further texts to the collection, it was not possible to extend the list further within the frameworks
of this project. The EPAS list is large and varied enough to show a tendency. Certainly, the
instances of individual EPAS would have been higher and the list would also have been
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