Dr Beatrice Alex
Senior Lecturer and Chancellor's Fellow in Text Mining

- Edinburgh Futures Institute
- School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
- School of Informatics
Contact details
Address
- Street
-
50 George Square
Room 2.46 - City
- Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9JU
Availability
Office hour: Tuesdays 3-4pm
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.
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 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
-
Automated clinical coding: What, why, and where we are?
(8 pages)
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)
Research output: Contribution to Workshop › Conference contribution (Published) -
Horses to Zebras: Ontology-Guided Data Augmentation and Synthesis for ICD-9 Coding
(13 pages)
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
Research output: Contribution to Workshop › Paper (Accepted/In press) -
Beyond Explanation:: A Case for Exploratory Text Visualizations of Non-Aggregated, Annotated Datasets
Research output: Contribution to Workshop › Paper (Accepted/In press) -
Developing Automatic Speech Recognition for Scottish Gaelic
Research output: Contribution to Workshop › Paper (Accepted/In press) -
Handwriting recognition for Scottish Gaelic
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
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
DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.05656
Research output: › Preprint (Published) -
Automated Clinical Coding: What, Why, and Where We Are?
(8 pages)
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)
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)
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Conference contribution (Published) -
Extending defoe for the efficient analysis of historical texts at scale
(9 pages)
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
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)
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)
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)
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Paper (Published) -
A systematic review of natural language processing applied to radiology reports
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)
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
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Abstract (Published)