Corpus-driven conceptual analysis of epidemic and coronavirus for the Humanitarian Encyclopedia

Abstract Terminological conceptual analysis can be applied to purposes beyond terminology work. This article presents a Frame-based Terminology approach adapted to analyse concepts and inform the content of entries in the Humanitarian Encyclopedia. It proposes a method for conceptual analysis by systematising the extraction of knowledge rich contexts (KRCs) around corpus querying tasks through semantic sketch grammars (SSGs) and macros with knowledge patterns (KPs). KRCs are curated manually, modelled into conceptual propositions, and combined with corpus metadata into unified datasets. The method was tested on epidemic and coronavirus and their results are presented. This study provides a preliminary model to operationalise the study of conceptual variation. It also identifies the areas of terminological conceptual analysis with the potential to be informed by other research methods towards creating a standalone methodology.