Dr Beatrice Alex

Senior Lecturer and Chancellor's Fellow in Text Mining

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

Office hour: Tuesdays 3-4pm

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 on automatically detecting anglicisms in French and German text in 2008. After that, she held a position as a Research Fellow at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh for a number of years working on text mining for different applications in healthcare, biomedicine, literature and history. Since 2018, she has been Chancellor's Fellow at the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI) and the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures as well as Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute and the School of Informatics. She was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2021.

Since 2018, she has been the head of the Edinburgh Language Technology Group (LTG), a research and development group working in the area of natural language engineering at the University of Edinburgh. She also leads the Edinburgh Clinical NLP Group.

Her research focuses on text mining and natural language processing to extract information from raw text. She's currently leading NLP work in the Advanced Care Research Centre and the AIM-CISC (Artificial Intelligence and Multimorbidity: Clustering in Individuals, Space and Clinical Context) project with a focus on developing tools that can assist in predicting multimorbidity and adverse drug events to improve care in later life. She's also leading the NLP work in the Warbler project with the aim to phenotype and analyse 1.7 mio brain imaging reports of the Scottish population.

On the humanities side, she leads the text mining and analysis work that is carried out by the Scottish Gaelic Algorithmic Research Group. Previously, she was part of the Palimpsest project on Mining Literary Edinburgh and is one of the core developers of the Edinburgh Geoparser.

She teaches text mining and computational text analysis methods to EFI students.

Responsibilities & affiliations

Most recently, Alex co-chaired the HealTAC 2021 conference on healthcare text analytics and is an editor on a special edition of Frontiers in Digital Health on "Healthcare Text Analytics: Unlocking the Evidence from Free Text".

Previously, she has been co-organiser of LaTeCH and LaTeCH-CLfL workshops and continues to server on its programme committee. She was co-convener of the Humanities and Data Science special interest group at The Alan Turing Institute. Alex also serves as an editor on the Journal of Open Humanities Data.

Teaching & PhD supervision

Postgraduate teaching

Course organiser:

- Text Mining for Social Research (fusion onsite and online)

Co-course organiser:

- Narrative and Computational Text Analysis

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

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 healthcare and digital humanities.