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Article published In:
The terminological impact of pandemics: COVID-19 and beyond
Edited by Maria-Cornelia Wermuth and Paul Sambre
[Terminology 29:2] 2023
► pp. 252–305

Denominative variation in the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset corpus

| University of Granada
ORCID logo | University of Granada

Since 2020, we have witnessed the emergence of new concepts and terms due to the pandemic outbreak. Some of them have even become obsolete in a short period of time whereas others are still misused despite standardization efforts. In this paper we study explicit denominative variation in the COVID-19 corpus, which consists of scientific articles released as part of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset and is publicly available in Sketch Engine. First of all, variants for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 and coronavirus disease 2019 were extracted by means of knowledge patterns (e.g., also known as). The productiveness of knowledge patterns was analyzed and a set of 1,684 explicit variation excerpts were collected and manually annotated. A total of 371 variants were retrieved and organized in two polydenominative clusters (i.e., 177 for COVID-19 and 193 for SARS-CoV-2), which were then formally and semantically characterized by comparison with the established designations. Finally, possible causes underlying denominative variation are explored.

Keywords: denominative variation, COVID-19 terminology, formal characterization, semantic characterization, causes of variation, knowledge patterns
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Denominative variation
    • 2.1Causes of denominative variation
    • 2.2Consequences of denominative variation
  • 3.Materials and methods
    • 3.1The COVID-19 corpus in Sketch Engine
    • 3.2Extraction of denominative variants
    • 3.3Establishing preferred denominations
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Analysis of KPs
    • 4.2Analysis of variants
      • 4.2.1Formal characterization of variants
        • Graphical changes
        • Morphosyntactic changes
        • Reductions
        • Expansions
        • Lexical changes
        • Multiple changes
      • 4.2.2Semantic characterization of variants
        • Minimum semantic distance
        • Medium semantic distance
        • Maximum semantic distance
    • 4.3Possible causes behind the use of COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 variants
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 October 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00071.ben
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