Applying computer-assisted coreferential analysis to a study of terminological variation in multilingual parallel corpora

Coreferential analysis involves identifying
    linguistic items (usually both lexical and grammatical items) that denote
    the same referent in a given text. To be able to study such coreferential items,
    each item first needs to be indexed or annotated according to a referent's corresponding
    identification code or label. Linguistic items that are identified as `coreferential'
    can be represented in a coreferential chain, i.e. a list of coreferential items
    extracted from the text in which the order of the items in the text is retained.
    We will discuss some of the benefits of applying coreferential analysis to a study
    of intra- and interlingual terminological variation in multilingual parallel corpora.
    Intralingual terminological variation refers to the different ways in which specialised
    knowledge can be expressed by means of terminological units (both single and multiword
    units) in a collection of source texts. Interlingual variation pertains to the
    different ways in which these source language terms are translated into the languages
    of the target texts. In this contribution, I will focus on how the method of coreferential
    analysis was used in a comparative study of (intra- and interlingual) terminological
    variation in original texts (i.e. the source texts) and their translations (i.e.
    the target texts). I will present a semi-automatic method to support the manual
    identification of intralingual terminological variants based on coreferential analysis.
    We will discuss how data resulting from coreferential analysis can be used to quantitatively
    compare terminological variation in source and target texts. Finally, I will present
    a new type of translation resource in which terminological variants in the source
    language are represented as a network of coreferential links.