Dr. Beatrice Alex | The University of Edinburgh

Chancellor's Fellow and Turing Fellow

Edinburgh Futures Institute
School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
School of Informatics

Tel: +44 (0)131 6508988
Email: balex@ed.ac.uk
Web: Bea's Informatics webpage
Web: Bea's profile at the Turing
Web: Bea's profile on Edinburgh Research Explorer

Street: 50 George Square
Room 2.46
City: Edinburgh
Post code: EH8 9JU

Biography

Background

Beatrice Alex graduated in Languages, Translation and Interpreting (French and Russian) from Heriot-Watt University and received post-graduate training in computational linguistics and speech and language processing at the University of Edinburgh. She obtained her MSc in Speech and Language Processing and her Euromasters in Speech Processing in 2002 and her PhD in automatically detecting anglicisms in French and German text in 2008. She has been based at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh as a Research Fellow for a number of years working on text mining for different applications in literature, history, biomedicine and healthcare. Since 2018, she has been Chancellor's Fellow at the Edinburgh Futures Institute and the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures as well as Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute and the School of Informatics.

Her research focuses on text mining and natural language processing to extract information from raw text. She was part of the Palimpsest project on Mining Literary Edinburgh and is one of the core developers of the Edinburgh Geoparser. Since 2018, she has been leading the Edinburgh Language Technology Group (LTG), a research and development group working in the area of natural language engineering at the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Alex is PI or Co-I on a number of awards for text mining research.

Responsibilities & affiliations

Alex has been co-organiser of LaTeCH and LaTeCH-CLfL workshops. She is also co-convener of the Data Science and Digital Humanities special interest group at The Alan Turing Institute and serves as an editor on the Journal of Open Humanities Data.

Research

Research summary

Dr. Alex's research interests include text mining for written text and speech transcripts and her work is applied in different domains such as digital humanities and healthcare.

Research activities

Digital Humanities 2019 11 Jul 2019
Using Curatorial Voice 18 Jun 2019
Plague DOT text: Text mining and annotation of plague outbreak reports 29 May 2019
Centre for Medical Informatics Seminar 13 May 2019
Second UK Healthcare Text Analytics Conference 24 Apr 2019

View all 10 activities on Research Explorer

Publications

Teaching a Text Mining Bootcamp in Lockdown (7 pages) Jun 2020
Research output: › Working paper (Published)
Geoparsing the Historical Gazetteers of Scotland: Accurately Computing Location in Mass Digitised Texts (7 pages) 12 Mar 2020
Research output: Contribution to Workshop › Conference contribution (Accepted/In press)
Comparison of Rule-based and Neural Network Models for Negation Detection in Radiology Reports (29 pages) 9 Mar 2020 In: Natural Language Engineering
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Accepted/In press)
Geoparsing Historical and Contemporary Literary Text set in the City of Edinburgh (24 pages) 1 Dec 2019 In: Language Resources and Evaluation, vol. 53, pp. 651–675
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-019-09443-x
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Text Mining Brain Imaging Reports 12 Nov 2019 In: Journal of Biomedical Semantics, vol. 10
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13326-019-0211-7
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Automatic coding of occupation and cause-of-death records (1 page) 8 Nov 2019 In: International Journal of Population Data Science, vol. 4
DOI: https://doi.org/10.23889/ijpds.v4i3.1202
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Meeting abstract (Published)
Detecting Topic-Oriented Speaker Stance in Conversational Speech (5 pages) 19 Sep 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2632
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Conference contribution (Published)
Plague Dot Text: Text mining and annotation of outbreak reports of the Third Plague Pandemic (1894-1952) 12 Sep 2019
Research output: › Conference contribution (Published)
A validated natural language processing algorithm for brain imaging phenotypes from radiology reports in UK electronic health records 9 Sep 2019 In: Bmc medical informatics and decision making
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-019-0908-7
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print)
"Why is the Doctor a Man?" Reactions of Older Adults to a Virtual Training Doctor (6 pages) 2 May 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3312811
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Conference contribution (Published)
Named Entity Recognition for Electronic Health Records: A Comparison of Rule-based and Machine Learning Approaches (8 pages) 26 Feb 2019
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Paper (Accepted/In press)
Text Mining Brain Imaging Reports Apr 2018
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Paper (Published)
'Multiplicity embarrasses the eye': The digital mapping of literary Edinburgh 14 Dec 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315099781
Research output: › Chapter (peer-reviewed) (Published)
Palimpsest: Improving Assisted Curation of Loco-specific Literature (13 pages) 1 Apr 2017 In: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 32, pp. i4-i16
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqw050
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Sensitizing social data science: combining empirical social research with computational approaches to influencer detection 2017
Research output: › Working paper (Submitted)
Sensitizing social data science: Combining empirical social research with computational approaches to the analysis of career data (49 pages) 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/20.500.11820/5d00df5f-3359-4188-afc2-4ebadf8d826e
Research output: › Working paper (In preparation)
User-driven Text Mining of Historical Text (22 pages) 12 Jun 2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-1-84334-749-1.00009-3
Research output: › Chapter (Published)
Homing in on Twitter users: Evaluating an Enhanced Geoparser for User Profile Locations (9 pages) May 2016
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Conference contribution (Published)
Geoparsing History: Locating Commodities in Ten Million Pages of Nineteenth-Century Sources (27 pages) 2016 In: Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, vol. 49, pp. 115-131
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2015.1116419
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Trading Consequences: A Case Study of Combining Text Mining and Visualization to Facilitate Document Exploration (26 pages) 1 Dec 2015 In: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 30, pp. 50-75
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqv046
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)

View all 55 publications on Research Explorer

This article was published on 18 Sep, 2020