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Extractive text summarization has over the years been an important research area in Natural Language Processing. Numerous methods have been proposed for extracting information from text documents. Recent works have shown great success for English summarization tasks by fine-tuning the language model BERT using large summarization datasets. However, less research has been made for low-resource languages. This work contributes by investigating how BERT can be used for Norwegian text summarization. Two models are developed by applying a modified BERT architecture, called BERTSum, on pre-trained Norwegian and Multilingual BERT. The results are models able to predict key sentences from articles to generate bullet-point summaries. These models are evaluated with the automatic metric ROUGE and in this evaluation, the Multilingual BERT model outperforms the Norwegian model. The multilingual model is further evaluated in a human evaluation by journalists, revealing that the generated summaries are not entirely satisfactory in some aspects. With some improvements, the model shows to be a valuable tool for journalists to edit and rewrite generated summaries, saving time and workload. / <p>Examensarbetet är utfört vid Institutionen för teknik och naturvetenskap (ITN) vid Tekniska fakulteten, Linköpings universitet</p>

This project uses corpus linguistics and geostatistics to test the sociolinguistic typological theory put forward by Peter Trudgill on the history of Norwegian. The theory includes several effects of societal factors on language change. Most discussed is the proposal that ‘intensive’ language contact causes simplification of language grammar. In the Norwegian case, the claim is that simplificatory changes which affected all of the Continental North Germanic languages (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian) but not the Insular North Germanic Languages were the result of contact with Middle Low German through the Hanseatic League. This suggests that those simplificatory changes arose in the centres of contact with the Hanseatic League: cities with Hansa trading posts and kontors. The size of the dataset required would have made it impossible for previous scholars to test this prediction, but digital approaches render the problem tractable. I have designed a 3.5m word corpus containing nearly all extant Middle Norwegian, and developed statistical methods for examining the spread of language phenomena in time and space. The project is made up of a series of case studies of changes. Three examine simplifying phonological changes: the rise of svarabhakti (epenthetic) vowels, the change of /hv/ > /kv/ and the loss of the voiceless dental fricative. A further three look at simplifying morphological changes: the loss of 1.sg. verbal agreement, the loss of lexical genitives and the loss of 1.pl. verbal agreement. In each case study a large dataset from many documents is collected and used to map the progression of the change in space and time. The social background of document signatories is also used to map the progression of the change through different social groups. A variety of different patterns emerge for the different changes examined. Some changes spread by contagious diffusion, but many spread by hierarchical diffusion, jumping first between cities before spreading to the country at large. One common theme which runs through much of the findings is that dialect contact within the North Germanic language area seems to have played a major role: many of the different simplificatory changes may first have spread into Norwegian from Swedish or Danish. Although these findings do not exactly match the simple predictions originally proposed from the sociolinguistic typological theory, they are potentially consistent with a more nuanced account in which the major centres of contact and so simplifying change were in Sweden and Denmark rather than Norway.

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This thesis investigates the development of the present-day linguistic hegemonies within Italy and Norway as products of ongoing linguistic ‘wars of position’. Language activist movements have been key actors in these struggles, and this study seeks to address how such movements have operated in attempts to translate their linguistic ideologies into de facto language policy through mechanisms such as political agitation, propaganda and the use of language in public spaces. It also reveals which other extra-linguistic values and ideologies have become associated with or allied to these linguistic causes in recent years, how these ideologies have affected language policy, and whether such ideological alliances have been representative of language users’ ideologies. The study is informed by an innovative methodological framework combining the theories and metaphors of Antonio Gramsci (including hegemony and wars of position as well as his linguistic writings) with the theories of Stein Rokkan on cultural-political cleavage structures and the relationships between centres and peripheries. These constructs and relationships are thereafter documented as ideologically defining strands running through the history of the movements studied, through reference to activist periodicals and party newspapers. In Italy, the focus of the research is on the Lega Nord (Northern League), a far-right populist autonomist political movement. The Lega has sought to legitimise its imagination of a northern nation (‘Padania’) by portraying the dialects of northern Italy as minority languages, emphasising the hegemonic relationship between the Italian national language and northern dialects. The movement has also used this perception of northern dialects as peripheral and suppressed by Italian to bolster its depiction of ‘Padania’ as a wealthy periphery allegedly held back by central and southern Italy. Although this campaign has achieved some successes in increased visibility of dialects in public spaces, dialects largely remain restricted to ‘low’-status domains. In Norway, the thesis devotes special attention to the post-war efforts of the counter-hegemonic campaign for the Nynorsk standard of Norwegian, which was devised as a common denominator for Norwegian dialects, as opposed to the hegemonic standard Bokmål, which is a Norwegianisation of written Danish. In opposing the challenges of globalisation and centralisation, the Nynorsk movement has retained a radical character and is generally associated with a left-wing variant of nationalism, a key part of the Norwegian cultural cleavage structure. The social argumentation of the Nynorsk movement was instrumental in its successful promotion of dialects, now seen as an unstigmatised means of spoken communication in all social contexts.

This thesis deals with cleft senteces in Norwegian and French. The analysis is carried out on Norwegian originals and their French translations. This makes it possible to study the cleft sentence in the same context. Cleft sentences in Norwegian were analysed from the functional sentence perspective, syntactic and morfological point of view. It means that I studied the contextual dependece or indepence of the sentence elements and their degree of communicative dynamism, syntactic function of the focused elements and which words represent the focused elements. The main aim of the thesis is to find out how cleft sentences are translated from Norwegian to French

The goal of this thesis is to identify cultural standards of Norway from the Czech point of view. These standards are defined both on the basis of my own experience with this culture and thanks interviews with those who have stayed in Norway for a longer time. The cultural standards show clearly the essential differences of Norwegian and Czech culture. The thesis also includes advice and recommendations for effective communication with the Norwegians. This thesis could thus serve mainly to everyone who intends to communicate or cooperate with Norwegian business partners. The theoretical part contains the processes of social interaction and intercultural communication and also the concepts of cultural standards and dimensions.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse translations of audiovisual material from Norwegian to Czech. The theoretical part of the thesis discusses audiovisual translation in general, with special emphasis on subtitling. Strategies and concepts significant for the translation of subtitles are described, as well as different aspects of the quality of their translation. The empirical part analyses firstly the audiovisual material itself (the Headhunters movie) and consequently analyses the translation strategies and solutions used in the translation. The analysis is based on Lomheim's model. The translation of marked speech, culturally bound elements and humor is also discussed. Finally, the quality of translation is assessed. Key words: audiovisual translation, translation, subtitles, film, Norwegian, Czech

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<p>The main question to be answered in this thesis is under what conditions bare singulars are acceptable in Norwegian. Although every native speaker of Norwegian masters the art of determining (unconsciously) when bare singulars can occur, it has turned out to be an amazingly complicated task to explicitly state the sufficient and necessary conditions for appropriate use of these phrases in Norwegian. This thesis is an attempt to reach that goal.</p>