Cover not available

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

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required

Denominative variation in the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset corpus

 | University of Granada
ORCiD logo with link | University of Granada
Published online: 26 October 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/term.00071.ben
Abstract
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.
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
References (43)
References
Aguado de Cea, Guadalupe, and Elena Montiel-Ponsoda. 2012. “Term Variants in Ontologies”. In Proceedings of the 30th International Conference of AESLA, 436–443. Lleida: Lleida University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Alves da Costa, Lucimara, and Sabela Fernández-Silva. 2018. “Análisis de la función cognitiva de la variación denominativa en la Lexicografía brasileña: patrones conceptuales de variación y distancia semántica entre las variantes”. Meta 63 (2): 467–491. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Aussenac-Gilles, Nathalie and Anne Condamines. 2012. “Variation and Semantic Relation Interpretation: Linguistic and Processing Issues”. Terminology an Knowledge Engineering, 106–122. Madrid, Spain.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barrière, Caroline. 2016. “Pattern-Based Relation Extraction”. In Natural Language Understanding in a Semantic Web Context, 205–229. Switzerland: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bowker, Lynne. 2020. “French-language COVID-19 terminology. International or localized?” Terminology 7(1/2): 1–27.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bowker, Lynne and Shane Hawkins. 2006. “Variation in the Organization of Medical Terms. Exploring some Motivations for Term Choice”. Terminology 12 (1): 79–110.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cabré i Castellví, María Teresa. 1993. La terminología: Teoría, metodología, aplicaciones. Barcelona: Editorial Empuries.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2002. “Terminología y Lingüística: la Teoría de las Puertas”. Estudios de Lingüística del Español, 161.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. “El principio de poliedricidad: La articulación de lo discursivo, lo cognitivo y lo lingüístico en Terminología (I)”. Ibérica 161: 9–36.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Candel-Mora, Miguel Ángel, and María Luisa Carrió-Pastor. 2012. “Corpus Analysis: A Pragmatic Perspective on Term Variation”. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada (RESLA) 25 (1): 33–50.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Faber Benítez, Pamela. 2009. “The Cognitive Shift in Terminology and Specialized Translation”. MonTI, 11: 107–134. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fauquet, Claude M. Mayo, Mike A. Maniloff, Jack Desselberger, Ulrich. Ball, Lawrence Andrew. 2005. The International Code for Virus Classification and Nomenclature of ICTV, Virus Taxonomy, pp. 1209–1214. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fernández-Silva, Sabela and Koen Kerremans. 2011. “Terminological Variation in Source Texts and Translations: a Pilot Study”. Meta 56 (2): 318–335. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fernández-Silva, Sabela, Judit Freixa Aymerich and Maria Teresa Cabré i Castellví. 2009. “The Multiple Motivation in the Denomination of Concepts”. Terminology, Science and Research: Journal of the International Institute for Terminology Research 201: 1–24.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fernández-Silva, Sabela. 2013. “La influencia del área disciplinar en la variación terminológica: un estudio en un corpus interdisciplinario sobre pesca”. Revista Signos. Estudios de Lingüística 831: 361–388.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2019. “The Cognitive and Communicative Functions of Term Variation in Research Articles: A Comparative Study in Psychology and Geology”. Applied Linguistics 40 (4): 624–645. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Freixa Aymerich, Judit and Sabela Fernández-Silva. 2017. “Terminological Variation and the Unsaturability of Concepts”. In Multiple Perspectives on Terminological Variation, edited by Patrick Drouin, Aline Francœur, John Humbley and Aurélie Picton, 155–180. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Freixa Aymerich, Judit, Sabela Fernández Silva and Maria Teresa Cabré Castellví. 2008. “La multiplicité des chemins dénominatifs”. Meta, 53(4), 731–747. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Freixa Aymerich, Judit. 2002. La variació terminològica. Anàlisi de la variació denominativa en textos de diferent grau d’especialització de l’àrea de medi ambient. PhD diss., University of Barcelona.
. 2013. “Otra vez sobre las causas de la variación denominativa”. Debate Terminológico 91: 38–46.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2022. “Causes of terminological variation”. In Theoretical Perspectives on Terminology: Explaining terms, concepts and specialized knowledge, edited by Faber, Pamela and L’Homme, Marie-Claude. Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice, 231: 399–420. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gaudin, François. 2003. “Socioterminologie: une approche sociolinguistique de la terminologie”. Cahiers de praxématique 421: 208–212.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gregory, Michael, and Susanne Carroll. 1978. Language and Situation: Language Varieties and their Social Contexts. Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haddad Haddad, Amal and Montero-Martínez, Silvia. 2020. “COVID-19: a metaphor-based neologism and its translation into Arabic”. Journal of Science Communication (JCOM), 19(05):1–21. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halskov, Jakob, and Caroline Barrière. 2010. “Web-Based Extraction of Semantic Relation Instances for Terminology”. In Probing Semantic Relations: Exploration and Identification in Specialized Texts, 19–42. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Khan, Tariq and Syed Muhammad Jamal. 2021. SARS-CoV-2 nomenclature: viruses, variants and vaccines need a standardized naming system. Future Virology. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kilgarriff, Adam, Pavel Rychlý, Pavel Smrz and David Tugwell. 2004. “The Sketch Engine”. In Proceedings of the 11th EURALEX International Congress, EURALEX 2004, edited by Geoffrey Williams and Sandra Vessier, 105–115. Lorient: Université de Bretagne Sud.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leaman, Robert and Zhiyong Lu. 2020. “A Comprehensive Dictionary and Term Variation Analysis for COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2”. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 (Part 2) at EMNLP 2020, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
León-Araúz, Pilar. 2017. “Term and concept variation in specialized knowledge dynamics”. In Multiple Perspectives on Terminological Variation, edited by Drouin, P., Francœur, A., Humbley, J. and Picton, A. Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice, 181:213–258. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
León-Araúz, Pilar and Arianne Reimerink. 2019. High-density knowledge rich contexts. Argentinian Journal of Applied Linguistics, 7(1):109–130.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
León-Araúz, Pilar, Melania Cabezas-García, and Arianne Reimerink. 2020. “Representing Multiword Term Variation in a Terminological Knowledge Base: A Corpus-Based Study.” In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), 2358–2367. Marseille: European Language Resources Association.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
León-Araúz, Pilar, Antonio San Martín Pizarro, and Pamela Faber Benítez. 2016. “Pattern-Based Word Sketches for the Extraction of Semantic Relations.” In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Computational Terminology (Computerm2016), edited by Patrick Drouin et al., 73–82. Osaka: The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meyer, Ingrid. 2001. “Extracting Knowledge-Rich Contexts for Terminography. A Conceptual and Methodological Framework”. In Recent Advances in Computational Terminology, edited by Didier Bourigault, Christian Jacquemin, and Marie-Claude L’Homme, 279–302. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Picton, Aurélie. 2011. “Picturing Short-term Diachronic Phenomena in Specialized Corpora. A Textual Terminology Description of the Dynamics of Knowledge in Space Technologies”. Terminology 17(1): 134–156Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rogers, Margaret. 1997. “Synonymy and Equivalence in Special-Language Texts”. In Text Typology and Translation, edited by Anna Trosborg, 217–245. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sager, Juan Carlos. 1990. “The Linguistic Dimension”. In A Practical Course in Terminology Processing, 55–97. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Suárez de la Torre, María Mercedes. 2004. Análisis contrastivo de la variación denominativa en textos especializados: del texto original al texto meta. PhD diss., Pompeu Fabra University.
Temmerman, Rita. 2000. “Towards New Ways of Terminology Description”. In Towards New Ways of Terminology Description. The Sociocognitive Approach, ed. by Helmi Sonneveld and Sue Ellen Wright, 219–237. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tomaszewska, Aleksandra, and Natalia Zawadzka-Paluektau. 2020. “Translating a Pandemic: A Corpus Study of COVID-19 Multi-Word Terminology in EU Press Releases”. Beyond Philology An International Journal of Linguistics, Literary Studies and English Language Teaching, no. 17(4) (September): 11–44. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wang, Lucy Lu, Kyle Lo, Yoganand Chandrasekhar, Russell Reas, Jiangjiang Yang, Doug Burdick, Darrin Eide, Kathryn Funk, Yannis Katsis, Rodney Michael Kinney, Yunyao Li, Ziyang Liu, William Merrill, Paul Mooney, Dewey A. Murdick, Devvret Rishi, Jerry Sheehan, Zhihong Shen, Brandon Stilson, et al. 2020. “CORD-19: The COVID-19 Open Research Dataset”. In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 at ACL 2020, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wüster, Eugene. 1979. Introduction à la théorie générale de la terminologie et à la lexicographie terminologique. GIRSTERM. Université Laval.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
World Health Organization. 2020. “Naming the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) and the Virus that Causes it”. Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic (Country and Technical Guidance Emergencies). Accessed May 30, 2020. [URL]
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue