Unknown error in Xpath

Team,
I have a xsl stylesheet that has a template with following statements:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"; version="1.0">
        <xsl:output method="html"/>
        <xsl:template match="/newsletter">
..
..
..
<xsl:variable name="classification" 
select="normalize-space(metadata/article-classification/.)"/>
<xsl:if test="contains($classification,'News')">

When I run the stylesheet with an XML file, I get following error:

got an exception....Unknown error in Xpath
; SystemID: file:..... Line#: 365; Column#: 98
Line 365 is the <xsl:variable....> line.
If I run it without this statement, it runs fine. I don't see any obvious error 
in that statement. Any clues? 
Thanks
Vivek



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