Dr Beatrice Alex | The University of Edinburgh

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 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. She was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2021.

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 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. 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 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 serves as an editor on the Journal of Open Humanities Data. Most recently, she co-chaired the HealTAC 2021 conference on healthcare text analytics.

Teaching & PhD supervision

Postgraduate teaching

Course organiser:

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

Co teaching:

- Digital Humanities for Literary Studies

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 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

Automated clinical coding: What, why, and where we are? (8 pages) 22 Oct 2022 In: npj Digital Medicine, vol. 5, pp. 1-8
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-022-00705-7
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Review article (Published)
Uncertainty and inclusivity in gender bias annotation: An annotation taxonomy and annotated datasets of British English text (28 pages) 15 Jul 2022
Research output: Contribution to Workshop › Conference contribution (Published)
Horses to Zebras: Ontology-Guided Data Augmentation and Synthesis for ICD-9 Coding (13 pages) 3 Jun 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.bionlp-1.39
Research output: Contribution to Workshop › Conference contribution (Published)
Building Trans-Inclusive Datasets: A Gender Bias Taxonomy and Annotated Datasets of British English Text 11 May 2022
Research output: Contribution to Workshop › Paper (Accepted/In press)
Beyond Explanation:: A Case for Exploratory Text Visualizations of Non-Aggregated, Annotated Datasets 6 May 2022
Research output: Contribution to Workshop › Paper (Accepted/In press)
Developing Automatic Speech Recognition for Scottish Gaelic 6 May 2022
Research output: Contribution to Workshop › Paper (Accepted/In press)
Handwriting recognition for Scottish Gaelic 6 May 2022
Research output: Contribution to Workshop › Paper (Accepted/In press)
Procalcitonin Is Not a Reliable Biomarker of Bacterial Coinfection in People With Coronavirus Disease 2019 Undergoing Microbiological Investigation at the Time of Hospital Admission 1 May 2022 In: Open forum infectious diseases, vol. 9
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/ofid/ofac179
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Ontology-based and weakly supervised rare disease phenotyping from clinical notes 1 May 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.05656
Research output: › Preprint (Published)
Automated Clinical Coding: What, Why, and Where We Are? (8 pages) 21 Mar 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2203.11092
Research output: › Preprint (Published)
The Lothian Diary Project: Sociolinguistic methods during the COVID-19 lockdown (10 pages) 22 Feb 2022 In: Linguistics Vanguard, pp. 1
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
CoPHE: A Count-Preserving Hierarchical Evaluation Metric in Large-Scale Multi-Label Text Classification (6 pages) 7 Nov 2021
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Conference contribution (Published)
Extending defoe for the efficient analysis of historical texts at scale (9 pages) 26 Oct 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/eScience51609.2021.00012
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Conference contribution (Published)
The reporting quality of natural language processing studies - systematic review of studies of radiology reports 2 Oct 2021 In: BMC medical imaging
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12880-021-00671-8
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Classifying patient and professional voice in social media health posts (10 pages) 18 Aug 2021 In: Bmc medical informatics and decision making, vol. 21, pp. 1-10
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-021-01577-9
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
COVID-19 symptoms at hospital admission vary with age and sex: results from the ISARIC prospective multinational observational study (17 pages) 25 Jun 2021 In: Infection
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s15010-021-01599-5
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Towards Better Use of Ontological Structure in the Evaluation of Automated ICD Coding (5 pages) 18 Jun 2021
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Paper (Published)
A systematic review of natural language processing applied to radiology reports 3 Jun 2021 In: Bmc medical informatics and decision making, vol. 21
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-021-01533-7
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
A systematic review of natural language processing applied to radiology reports (18 pages) 3 Jun 2021 In: Bmc medical informatics and decision making, vol. 21
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12911-021-01533-7
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Documenting gender identities: Challenges and approaches to records of gender in archival metadata descriptions 1 Jun 2021
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Abstract (Published)

View all 87 publications on Research Explorer

This article was published on 6 Jan, 2023