University Crest

Dr. Beatrice Alex

Chancellor's Fellow and
Turing Fellow in Text Mining

 Bea Alex







Contact Details:
University of Edinburgh
50 George Square, R. 2.46
Edinburgh, EH8 9JU, UK

But mostly in the safety
of my own home office
right now
balex@ed.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (131) 650 8988

Publications

See my Google Scholar profile for a list of my pulications.

2021

  • Lauren Hall-Lew, Claire Cowie, Stephen Joseph McNulty, Nina Markl, Shan-Jan Sarah Liu, Catherine Lai, Clare Llewellyn, Beatrice Alex, Nini Fang, Zuzana Elliott, and Anita Klingler (2021). The Lothian Diary Project: Investigating the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Edinburgh and Lothian Residents. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 7: 4, pp. 1–5. [DOI]
  • Arlene Casey, Emma Davidson, Michael Poon, Hang Dong, Daniel Duma, Andreas Grivas, Claire Grover, Víctor Suárez-Paniagua, Richard Tobin, William Whiteley, Honghan Wu and Beatrice Alex (2021). A Systematic Review of Natural Language Processing Applied to Radiology Reports. [arXiv, pdf]
  • Arlene Casey, Mike Bennett, Richard Tobin, Claire Grover, Iona Walker, Lukas Engelmann and Beatrice Alex (2021). Plague Dot Text: Text Mining and Annotation of Outbreak Reports of the Third Plague Pandemic (1894-1952), accepted for publication in the Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities, January 2021. [arXiv, url, pdf]

2020

  • Andreas Grivas, Beatrice Alex, Claire Grover, Richard Tobin, William Whiteley (2020). Not a cute stroke: Analysis of Rule- and Neural Network-Based Information Extraction Systems for Brain Radiology Reports, in Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Health Text Mining and Information Analysis (LOUHI 2020) at EMNLP 2020, November 2020. [pdf]
  • Lucy Havens, Melissa Terras, Benjamin Bach, Beatrice Alex (2020). Situated Data, Situated Systems: A Methodology to Engage with Power Relations in Natural Language Processing Bias Research. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing at COLING 2020. [pdf]
  • Vebjørn Espeland, Benjamin Bach, Beatrice Alex (2020). Enhanced Labelling in Active Learning for Coreference Resolution. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference (CRAC 2020) at COLING 2020. [pdf]
  • Clare Llewellyn, Pawel Orzechowski and Beatrice Alex (2020). Teaching a Text Mining Bootcamp in Lockdown, University of Edinburgh, Jun 2020, Edinburgh, pp. 1-7. [URL, pdf]
  • Barbara McGillivray, Beatrice Alex, Sarah Ames, Guyda Armstrong, David Beavan, Arianna Ciula, Giovanni Colavizza, James Cummings, David De Roure, Adam Farquhar, Simon Hengchen, Anouk Lang, James Loxley, Eirini Goudarouli, Federico Nanni, Andrea Nini, Julianne Nyhan, Nicola Osborne, Thierry Poibeau, Mia Ridge, Sonia Ranade, James Smithies, Melissa Terras, Andreas Vlachidis and Pip Willcox (2020). The challenges and prospects of the intersection of humanities and data science: A White Paper from The Alan Turing Institute, white paper, The Alan Turing Institute, August 2020. [URL, DOI, pdf]
  • Rosa Filgueira, Claire Grover, Melissa Terras and Beatrice Alex (2020). Geoparsing the historical Gazetteers of Scotland: accurately computing location in mass digitised texts. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on the Challenges in the Management of Large Corpora (CMLC-8 2020) at LREC 2020, pp.24-30. [pdf]
  • Dominic Sykes, Andreas Grivas, Claire Grover, Richard Tobin, Cathie Sudlow, William Whiteley, Andrew McIntosh, Heather Whalley, Beatrice Alex (2020). Comparison of Rule-based and Neural Network Models for Negation Detection in Radiology Reports. Journal of Natural Language Engineering, 2020. [DOI, accepted manuscript]

2019

  • Richard Tobin, Elaine Farrow, Claire Grover, Beatrice Alex (2019). Automatic coding of occupation and cause-of-death records, presented at ADR 2019, Cardiff, UK, December 2019. [URL]
  • Beatrice Alex, Claire Grover, Richard Tobin, Cathie Sudlow, Grant Mair and William Whiteley (2019). Text Mining Brain Imaging Reports. Journal of Biomedical Semantics, 10, 23, 2019, doi:10.1186/s13326-019-0211-7. [URL, pdf]
  • Beatrice Alex, Claire Grover, Richard Tobin and Jon Oberlander (2019). Geoparsing Historical and Contemporary Literary Text set in the City of Edinburgh, Language Resources and Evaluation, 53(4): 651-675. [URL, pdf]
  • Emily Wheater, Grant Mair, Cathie Sudlow, Beatrice Alex, Claire Grover and William Whiteley (2019). A validated natural language processing algorithm for brain imaging phenotypes from radiology reports in UK electronic health records. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 19, 184, 2019, doi:10.1186/s12911-019-0908-7. [URL, pdf]
  • Arlene Casey, Mike Bennett, Richard Tobin, Claire Grover, Lukas Engelmann and Beatrice Alex (2019). Plague Dot Text: Text mining and annotation of outbreak reports of the Third Plague Pandemic (1894-1952), In Proceedings of HistoInformatics 2019 at the 23rd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2019), CEUR Vol-2461, Oslo, Norway, 2019. [pdf]
  • Catherine Lai, Beatrice Alex, Johanna Moore, Leimin Tian, Tatsuro Hori and Gianpiero Francesca, Detecting Topic-Oriented Speaker Stance in Converstational Speech, In Proceedings of Interspeech 2019, September 2019. [URL, pdf]
  • Philip John Gorinski, Honghan Wu, Claire Grover, Richard Tobin, Conn Talbot, Heather Whalley, Cathie Sudlow, William Whiteley and Beatrice Alex (2019). Named Entity Recognition for Electronic Health Records: A Comparison of Rule-based and Machine Learning Approaches, accepted for presentation at the HealTAC 2019 Conference, 24-25th of April 2019. [arXiv.org]
  • Aurora Constantin, Catherine Lai, Elaine Farrow, Beatrice Alex, Ruth Pel-Littel, Henk Herman Nap and Johan Jeuring (2019). "Why is the Doctor a Man?" Reactions of Older Adults to a Virtual Training Doctor. (Accepted) Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Glasgow., May 2019. [URL, pdf, video]

2018

  • Claire Grover, Richard Tobin, Beatrice Alex, Catherine Sudlow, Grant Mair and William Whiteley (2018). Text Mining Brain Imaging Reports. In Proceedings of HealTAC-2018, April 2018.
  • James Loxley, Beatrice Alex, Miranda Anderson, Uta Hinrichs, Claire Grover, Tara Thomson, David Harris-Birtill, Aaron Quigley and Jon Oberlander (2018). 'Multiplicity embarrasses the eye': The digital mapping of literary Edinburgh. In: Ian Gregory, Don Debats, Don Lafreniere (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Spatial History. [URL, accepted manuscript]

2017

  • Beatrice Alex (2017). Geoparsing English Text with the Edinburgh Geoparser, The Programming Historian lesson, October 2017. [URL]

2016

  • Beatrice Alex, Claire Grover, Jon Oberlander, Tara Thomson, Miranda Anderson, James Loxley, Uta Hinrichs and Ke Zhou (2016). Palimpsest: Improving assisted curation of loco-specific literature, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 2016, 07/11/2016. [URL]
  • Beatrice Alex, Clare Llewellyn, Claire Grover, Jon Oberlander and Richard Tobin (2016). Homing in on Twitter users: Evaluating an Enhanced Geoparser for User Profile Locations. In Proceedings of the 10th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), 23-28 May 2016, Portorož, Slovenia. [pdf, pre-print]
  • William Whiteley, Claire Grover, Beatrice Alex, Cathie Sudlow and Grant Mair (2016). A natural language processing algorithm to identify stroke in brain imaging reports on a large scale. Poster presented at the 2nd European Stroke Organisation Conference (ESOC 2016), Barcelona, Spain.
  • Jim Clifford, Beatrice Alex, Colin Coates, Andrew Watson and Ewan Klein, Geoparsing History: Locating Commodities in Ten Million Pages of Nineteenth-Century Sources. Historical Methods, 49(3), pp. 115-131. [URL]
  • Beatrice Alex, Claire Grover, Ewan Klein, Clare Llewellyn and Richard Tobin. (2016). User-driven Text Mining of Historical Text. Chapter in: E. Tonkin and G.J.L. Tourte (eds.), Working with text: Tools, techniques and approaches for text mining. Chandos Publishing. [URL].

2015

  • Beatrice Alex, Kate Byrne, Claire Grover and Richard Tobin. Adapting the Edinburgh Geoparser for Historical Georeferencing. International Journal for Humanities and Arts Computing, 9(1), pp. 15-35, March 2015. [pdf, pre-print]
  • Clare Llewellyn, Claire Grover, Beatrice Alex, Jon Oberlander and Richard Tobin. Extracting a Topic Specific Dataset from a Twitter Archive. In Proceedings of TPDL 2015, September 2015, Poznań, Poland, pp. 364-367. ***Winner of the best poster/demo award.*** [pdf, poster]
  • Uta Hinrichs, Beatrice Alex, Jim Clifford, Andrew Watson, Aaron Quigley, Ewan Klein, Colin M. Coates, Trading Consequences: A Case Study of Combining Text Mining and Visualization to Facilitate Document Exploration, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (DSH), special issue of DH2014, pp. 50-75. [pre-print, URL, pdf]
  • Beatrice Alex, Claire Grover, Jon Oberlander, Ke Zhou, and Uta Hinrichs. Palimpsest: Improving assisted curation of loco-specific literature. In Proceedings of DH2015, Sydney, Australia. [pdf]

2014

  • Beatrice Alex, Kate Byrne, Claire Grover and Richard Tobin. 2014. A Web-based Geo-resolution Annotation and Evaluation Tool. In Proceedings of the 8th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW VIII), COLING 2014, Dublin, Ireland, pp. 59-63. [pdf]
  • Beatrice Alex and John Burns. Estimating and Rating the Quality of Optically Character Recognised Text. In Proceedings of DATeCH 2014, Madrid, Spain, 97-102. [pdf, presentation]
  • Ewan Klein, Beatrice Alex and Jim Clifford. Bootstrapping a historical commodities lexicon with SKOS and DBpedia. In Proceedings of LaTeCH 2014 at EACL 2014. Gothenburg, Sweden, pp. 13–21. [paper, presentation]
  • Uta Hinrichs, Beatrice Alex, Jim Clifford and Aaron Quigley. Trading Consequences: A Case Study of Combining Text Mining & Visualisation to Facilitate Document Exploration. In Prodeedings of DH2014. [pdf]
  • Ewan Klein, Beatrice Alex, Claire Grover, Richard Tobin, Colin Coates, Jim Clifford, Aaron Quigley, Uta Hinrichs, James Reid, Nicola Osborne and Ian Fieldhouse. Digging Into Data White Paper: Trading Consequences, March 2014. [ pdf]

2012

  • Beatrice Alex, Claire Grover, Richard Tobin and Ewan Klein. Exploring Challenges in Mining Historical Text. Working with text: Tools, techniques and approaches for text mining. Workshop at OR2012. Edinburgh.
  • Bea Alex, Claire Grover, Ewan Klein and Richard Tobin. Digitised Historical Text: Does it have to be mediOCRe? In Proceedings of KONVENS 2012 (LThist 2012 workshop), Vienna, Austria, pp. 401-409. [pdf]
  • Bea Alex, Timothy Bristow, Jim Clifford, Colin Coates, Ian Fieldhouse, Claire Grover, Uta Hinrichs, Ewan Klein, Clare Llewellyn, Nicola Osborne, Aaron Quigley, James Reid and Richard Tobin. Trading Consequences. DemoFest 2012, Edinburgh, UK. [poster]

2011

  • Nikos Sarris, Gerasimos Potamianos, Jean-Michel Renders, Claire Grover, Eric Karstens, Leonidas Kallipolitis, Vasilis Tountopoulos, Georgios Petasis, Anastasia Krithara, Matthias Gallé, Guillaume Jacquet, Beatrice Alex, Richard Tobin and Liliana Bounegru. A System for Synergistically Structuring News Content from Traditional Media and the Blogosphere. eChallenges 2011. Florence, Italy. [pdf]
  • Beatrice Alex and Wolodja Wentland. Automatic Detection of English Inclusions in Mixed-lingual Data. The sociolinguistics and pragmatics of borrowing. Workshop at SLE 2012. Logroño. Spain.

2010

  • Beatrice Alex and Alexander Onysko. Zum Erkennen von Anglizismen im Deutschen: der Vergleich einer automatisierten und einer manuellen Erhebung. Carmen Scherer and Anke Holler (eds). Strategien der Isolation und Integration nicht-nativer Einheiten und Strukturen. de Gruyter, Berlin. [URL]
  • Bea Alex, Claire Grover, Rongzhou Shen and Mijail Kabadjov. Agile Corpus Annotation in Practice: An Overview of Manual and Automatic Annotation of CVs. In Proceedings of the 4th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW IV), Uppsala, Sweden, pp. 29–37. [pdf]
  • Claire Grover, Richard Tobin, Beatrice Alex and Kate Byrne. Edinburgh-LTG: TempEval-2 system description. In Proceedings of SemEval-2010. Uppsala, Sweden, pp. 333-336. [pdf]
  • Bea Alex and Claire Grover. Labelling and Spatio-Temporal Grounding of News Events. In Proceedings of the workshop on Computational Linguistics in a World of Social Media at NAACL 2010. Los Angeles, USA, pp. 27-28. [paper: pdf, presentation: prezi, poster: png]

2009

  • Bea Alex, Claire Grover, Kate Byrne and Rongzhou Shen. Text Mining News and the Blogosphere. Poster presentation at the DemoFest 2010. [png]

2008

  • Beatrice Alex. Automatic Detection of English Inclusions in Mixed-lingual Data with an Application to Parsing. PhD Thesis. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. [pdf]
  • Beatrice Alex, Claire Grover, Barry Haddow, Mijail Kabadjov, Ewan Klein, Michael Matthews, Richard Tobin, and Xinglong Wang. The ITI TXM Corpora: Tissue Expressions and Protein-Protein Interactions. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Building and Evaluating Resources for Biomedical Text Mining at the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008), Marrakech, Morocco. [pdf]
  • Beatrice Alex. Comparing Corpus-based to Web-based Lookup Techniques for Automatic English Inclusion Detection. In: Proceedings of LREC 2008, Marrakech, Morocco. [pdf]
  • Barry Haddow and Beatrice Alex. Exploiting Multiply Annotated Corpora in Biomedical Information Extraction Tasks. In: Proceedings of LREC 2008, Marrakech, Morocco.[pdf]
  • Beatrice Alex, Claire Grover, Barry Haddow, Mijail Kabadjov, Ewan Klein, Michael Matthews, Richard Tobin and Xinglong Wang. Automating Curation Using a Natural Language Processing Pipeline. Genome Biology, 9(Suppl 2):S10.[http]
  • Beatrice Alex and Alexander Onysko. Detecting English Loan-Influences in German: Contrasting the Effectiveness of automatic detection with human performance. Abstract and presentation at the Workshop on Strategies of Integrating and Isolating Non-Native Entities and Structures, 30th Annual Convention of the German Society of Linguistics. Bamberg, Germany.
  • Beatrice Alex, Claire Grover, Barry Haddow, Mijail Kabadjov, Ewan Klein, Michael Matthews, Stuart Roebuck, Richard Tobin and Xinglong Wang. Assisted Curation: Does Text Mining Really Help? In: Russ B Altman, A. Keith Dunker, Lawrence Hunter, Tiffany Murray, Teri E. Klein, editors, BIOCOMPUTING 2008. Proceedings of the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. Kohala Coast, Hawaii, USA. [pdf]

2007

  • Beatrice Alex, Amit Dubey, and Frank Keller. Using foreign inclusion detection to improve parsing performance. In: Proceedings of EMNLP-CoNLL 2007, Prague, Czech Republic. [pdf]
  • Beatrice Alex, Barry Haddow, and Claire Grover. Recognising nested named entities in biomedical text. In: Proceedings of BioNLP 2007, Prague, Czech Republic. [pdf]

2006

  • Beatrice Alex. Integrating Language Knowledge Resources to Extend the English Inclusion Classifier to a New Language. In: Proceedings of LREC 2006, Genoa, Italy. [pdf]
  • Beatrice Alex, Malvina Nissim and Claire Grover. The Impact of Annotation on the Performance of Protein Tagging in Biomedical Text. In: Proceedings of LREC 2006, Genoa, Italy.[pdf]

2005

  • Beatrice Alex. An Unsupervised System for Identifying English Inclusions in German Text. In: Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2005) - Student Research Workshop. Ann Arbor, Michigan. [pdf]
  • Benjamin Hachey, Beatrice Alex and Markus Becker. Investigating the Effects of Selective Sampling on the Annotation Task. In: Proceedings of the 9th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, Ann Arbour, Michigan, USA. [pdf]
  • Markus Becker, Benjamin Hachey, Beatrice Alex and Claire Grover. Optimising Selective Sampling for Bootstrapping Named Entity Recognition. In: Proceedings of the ICML-2005 workshop on Learning with Multiple Views, Bonn, Germany. [pdf]
  • Kisuh Ahn, Beatrice Alex, Johan Bos, Tiphaine Dalmas, Jochen L. Leidner and Matthew B. Smillie. Cross-Lingual Question Answering Using Off-the-Shelf Machine Translation. In: Peters et al. Multilingual Information Access for Text, Speech and Images. 5th Workshop of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2004, Bath, UK, Revised Selected Papers. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 3491.

2004

  • Beatrice Alex and Claire Grover. An XML-based Tool for Tracking English Inclusions in German Text. In: PAPILLON 2004 Workshop on Multilingual Lexical Databases, Grenoble, France. [pdf]
  • Kisuh Ahn, Beatrice Alex, Johan Bos, Tiphaine Dalmas, Jochen L. Leidner and Matthew B. Smillie. Cross-lingual Question Answering with QED. Workshop of the Cross-Lingual Evaluation Forum (CLEF-2004) held at the European Conference for Digital Libraries (ECDL-2004), Bath, UK. [pdf]
  • Jenny Finkel, Shipra Dingare, Christopher Manning, Malvina Nissim, Beatrice Alex, and Claire Grover. Exploring the Boundaries: Gene and Protein Identification in Biomedical Text. BMC Bioinformatics 6 (Suppl 1). [pdf]
  • Shipra Dingare, Jenny Finkel, Christopher Manning, Malvina Nissim and Beatrice Alex. Exploring the Boundaries: Gene and Protein Identification in Biomedical Text. In: BioCreAtIvE Workshop (Critical Assessment of Information Extraction Systems in Biology), Granada, Spain. [pdf]
  • Ben Hachey, Huy Nguyen, Malvina Nissim, Beatrice Alex, and Claire Grover. Grounding Gene Mentions with Respect to Gene Database Identifiers. In: BioCreAtIvE Workshop (Critical Assessment of Information Extraction Systems in Biology), Granada, Spain. [pdf]
  • Yuval Krymolowski, Beatrice Alex, and Jochen L. Leidner. BioCreative Task 2.1. The Edinburgh-Stanford System. In: BioCreAtIvE Workshop (Critical Assessment of Information Extraction Systems in Biology), Granada, Spain. [pdf]


Last updated in April 2021.