Lexicon of pandemics: a semantic analysis of the Spanish flu and the Covid-19 timeframe terminology

PurposeThe aim of this study is a semantic comparative analysis between the current pandemic and the Spanish flu. It is based on a bilingual terminological perspective oriented to evaluate and compare the terms used to describe and communicate the pandemic's issues both to biomedical experts and to a non-specialist public.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis carried out is a terminological comparative investigation performed on two corpora, the first containing scientific English articles, the second Italian national newspapers' issues on two pandemics, the Spanish flu and the current Covid-19 disease, towards the detection of semantic similarities and differences among them through the implementation of computational tasks and corpus linguistics methodologies.FindingsGiven the cross-fielding representativeness of terms, and their relevance within specific historical eras, our study is conducted both on a synchronic and on a diachronic level to discover the common lexical usages in the dissemination of the pandemic issues.Originality/valueThe study presents the extraction of the main representative terms about two pandemics and their usages to share news about their trends among the population and the integration of a topic modeling detection procedure to discover some of the main categories representing the lexicon of the pandemics with reference to a list of classes created by external thesauri and ontologies on pandemics. As a result, a detailed overview of the discrepancies, as well as similarities, retrieved in two historical corpora dealing with a common subject, i.e. the pandemics' terminology, is provided.