COVID-19 has triggered innovations in science and society globally, leading to the emergence or establishment of formal neologisms such as infodemic and working from home (WFH). While previous work on COVID-related lexical innovation has focused on such formal neologisms, this paper uses data from Reddit to study semantic neologisms like lockdown and mask, which have changed in meaning due to the pandemic. First, we identify words that have undergone meaning changes since the start of the pandemic. Our approach, based on word embeddings, successfully detects a variety of COVID-related terms that dominate the resulting list of semantic neologisms. Next, we generate community-specific semantic representations for the communities r/Coronavirus and r/conspiracy, which are both highly engaged in COVID-related discourse. We analyse socio-semantic variation along two dimensions: an evaluative dimension, based on amelioration/pejorization, and the loyalty/betrayal dimension of Moral Foundations Theory. Our findings reveal that the detected semantic neologisms exhibit more negative and betrayal-related associations in r/conspiracy, a subreddit critical of COVID-related sociopolitical measures. Mapping the community-specific representations for the term vaccines on a shared semantic space confirms these differences and reveals more fine-grained denotational and connotational differences between the two communities.

中文翻译：

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语义变化和社会语义变异：Reddit 上与新冠病毒相关的新词案例

COVID-19 引发了全球科学和社会的创新，导致正式新词的出现或建立，例如信息流行病和居家办公（WFH）。虽然之前关于新冠病毒相关词汇创新的工作主要集中在此类形式新词上，但本文使用 Reddit 的数据来研究语义新词，例如封锁和面具，由于大流行，其含义发生了变化。首先，我们确定自大流行开始以来含义发生变化的单词。我们的方法基于词嵌入，成功地检测到各种与新冠病毒相关的术语，这些术语在语义新词列表中占主导地位。接下来，我们为社区生成特定于社区的语义表示r/冠状病毒和r/阴谋，两者都高度参与与新冠病毒相关的讨论。我们沿着两个维度分析社会语义变异：基于改善/贬低的评价维度，以及道德基础理论的忠诚/背叛维度。我们的研究结果表明，检测到的语义新词在以下方面表现出更多负面和与背叛相关的关联：r/阴谋，一个批评与新冠病毒相关的社会政治措施的 Reddit 子版块。映射该术语的社区特定表示疫苗在共享语义空间上的研究证实了这些差异，并揭示了两个社区之间更细粒度的外延和内涵差异。