Building Consistent Terminologies

Large terminologies tend to contain many inconsistencies on different linguistic levels. Mostly the multilingual inconsistencies are discussed for translation means, but monolingual inconsistencies introducing different variants of the same term cause already a large amount of problems during manual or automatic use of the terminology. The present article concentrates on monolingual inconsistencies in a specific collection of German terms. A classification is proposed of all variants encountered, based on their morphosyntactic properties. Automated solutions for the detection of these inconsistencies are suggested and a tentative implementation in a term checking tool is presented. The same tool can help users of the terminology to keep in line with it.