As for grammatical coreference, grammatical rules are followed; with textual coreference, the textual cohesion and coreference chains are preserved. The coreference chains are not always simple and straightforward, they do not always connect one node with another; they can also split. The current approach to the annotation of coreference does not allow for mutual interconnection of all the individual parts of a coreference chain; therefore the following rules are to be respected:
if the antecedent consists of several nodes in the tree that are dependent on each other, only the immediately preceeding node is co-referred to;
if there is a choice between an antecedent and postcedent the antecedent is preferred (in the future, an extended notion of coreference would secure the complete interconnection of the individual parts of a coreference chain);
if it is necessary to choose one of two antecedents that split the coreference chain, the leftmost antecedent is preferred (for reasons related to topic-focus-articulation);
if there is a choice between two antecedents with a different lexical content (the current approach to coreference does not allow for any indication of their referential identity), it is only referred to the closer one (again, under the extended approach to coreference, it will be possible to interconnect all parts of a coreference chain).