Beatrice Alex

Dr. Beatrice Alex is a Senior Lecturer and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, jointly affiliated with the Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI), the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, and the School of Informatics. She is also a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. Her work bridges computational linguistics, healthcare informatics, and digital humanities. She leads the Edinburgh Language Technology Group (LTG) and the Edinburgh Clinical NLP Group, focusing on text mining and natural language processing applications.

Her educational background includes a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh (2008), an MSc and Euromasters in Speech Processing (2002), and a BA in Languages, Translation and Interpreting from Heriot-Watt University.

Dr. Alex’s research centers on text mining and NLP for extracting information from raw text and speech transcripts. Her work spans healthcare (e.g., predicting multimorbidity, clinical NLP for radiology), digital humanities (e.g., analyzing literary texts, heritage metadata), and social science (e.g., neighborhood effects on health). She develops tools for automated metadata generation, bias detection in archival descriptions, and phenotyping from brain imaging reports.

Her recent publications (2024–2025) reflect a strong trend toward interdisciplinary research, combining NLP with public health, gender studies, and heritage science. Key themes include topic modeling of local newspapers for health insights, gender bias detection in catalogues, and automated neuroradiological support systems. The work often involves collaboration across computer science, medicine, and the humanities.

• Honorable Mention - CHI 2025 best papers
• Turing Fellowship (awarded 2016 and 2018)

Dr. Alex is actively involved in PhD supervision and teaches courses such as Text Mining for Social Research and Narrative and Computational Text Analysis. She has served as PI and Co-I on numerous research projects, including the Advanced Care Research Centre and AIM-CISC. She co-chaired the HealTAC 2021 conference and serves on the editorial board of Frontiers in Digital Health and the Journal of Open Humanities Data. She is also co-convener of the Data Science and Digital Humanities special interest group at The Alan Turing Institute.

She leads and participates in several research groups and initiatives:

• Edinburgh Language Technology Group (LTG) – cross-college NLP R&D
• Edinburgh Clinical NLP Group – healthcare applications
• Scottish Gaelic Algorithmic Research Group – humanities text mining
• Lothian Diary Project – pandemic experience and community narratives
• Palimpsest Project – literary Edinburgh mapping

She is a core developer of the Edinburgh Geoparser, contributing to spatial humanities research.