Empirical observation of term variations and principles for their description

Terms are often supposed not to be prone to variation. Empirical observation of terms in various corpora (telecommunication, physics, medicine) shows, on the contrary, the quantitative and qualitative importance of term variation. We give a precise linguistic description of the rules relating to controlled terms and observed variants and of the constraints on these rules. This description leads to novel means of enriching terminologies via the generation of possible term variants or the simplification of nominal parse trees in order to discover potential variants.