Interesting problem. Are you familiar with regular expressions? If so, you could use the search & replace feature. I could see something along the lines of
Code:
(?s)(?P<number>\[\d+\])(?P<word>\w+:)(?P<text>.*?)(?P=number)(?P=word)
as search expression work, you could then replace that with
Code:
\g<number>\g<word>\g<text>\g<number>\g<word>
plus whatever linking markup you need inserted around the first number/word pair.
The caveat here is that this is just off the top of my head. This may work, or it may fail catastrophically
