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

Extending defoe for the efficient analysis of historical texts at scale 30 Jun 2021
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Conference contribution (Accepted/In press)
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)
Documenting gender identities: Challenges and approaches to records of gender in archival metadata descriptions 1 Jun 2021
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Abstract (Published)
The online pivot: Lessons learned from teaching a text and data mining course in lockdown, enhancing online teaching with pair programming and digital badges (11 pages) 26 May 2021
Research output: › Conference contribution (Published)
Changes in in-hospital mortality in the first wave of COVID-19: a multicentre prospective observational cohort study using the WHO Clinical Characterisation Protocol UK 1 May 2021 In: The Lancet Respiratory Medicine
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-2600(21)00175-2
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
The Lothian Diary Project: Investigating the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Edinburgh and Lothian residents (5 pages) 16 Apr 2021 In: Journal of Open Humanities Data, vol. 7, pp. 1-5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.25
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Special issue (Published)
Comparison of Rule-based and Neural Network Models for Negation Detection in Radiology Reports (22 pages) 1 Mar 2021 In: Natural Language Engineering, vol. 27, pp. 203-224
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1351324920000509
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Plague Dot Text: Text mining and annotation of outbreak reports of the Third Plague Pandemic (1894-1952) (22 pages) 20 Jan 2021 In: Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities, pp. 1-22
DOI: https://doi.org/https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.01415v2
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Enhanced labelling in active learning for coreference resolution (11 pages) 12 Dec 2020
Research output: Contribution to Workshop › Conference contribution (Published)
Not a cute stroke: Analysis of Rule- and Neural Network-based Information Extraction Systems for Brain Radiology Reports (14 pages) 20 Nov 2020
Research output: Contribution to Workshop › Conference contribution (Published)
Situated Data, Situated Systems: A Methodology to Engage with Power Relations in Natural Language Processing Research 9 Oct 2020
Research output: Contribution to Workshop › Paper (Accepted/In press)
The challenges and prospects of the intersection of humanities and data science: A White Paper from The Alan Turing Institute. (30 pages) Aug 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12732164.v5
Research output: › Discussion paper (Published)
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) 16 May 2020
Research output: Contribution to Workshop › Conference contribution (Published)
Library Carpentry: Text & Data Mining 2020
Library Carpentries course on Text and Data Mining › Other contribution (Published)
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)

View all 68 publications on Research Explorer

This article was published on 25 Sep, 2021