text: Against the background of a growing interest in multilingual NLP , multilingual anaphora / coreference resolution has gained considerable momentum in recent years ( Aone and McKee 1993 ; Azzam , Humphreys , and Gaizauskas 1998 ; Harabagiu and Maiorano 2000 ; Mitkov and Barbu 2000 ; Mitkov 1999 ; Mitkov and Stys 1997 ; Mitkov , Belguith , and Stys 1998 ) .