Dr Beatrice Alex
Sabbatical Fellow, August-November 2024
Home Institution: University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Futures Institute and School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures
Dr. Beatrice Alex is a Senior Lecturer and Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, affiliated with the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures and the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She heads the Edinburgh Language Technology Group, where she leads research in text mining and Natural Language Processing (NLP) across diverse datasets, domains, and languages. Her projects include Decoding Hidden Heritages, which analyses Scottish Gaelic and Irish folktales. She also leads the Edinburgh Clinical NLP Group, focusing on extracting and labelling information in clinical text. For example, Dr Alex directs NLP research in the Advanced Care Research Centre (ADRC) and the AIM-CISC (Artificial Intelligence and Multimorbidity: Clustering in Individuals, Space and Clinical Context) project, developing tools predicting multimorbidity and adverse drug events to improve care in later life. Additionally, she leads the NLP work in the Warbler and ScanDan projects with the aim to phenotype and analyse 1.7 mio brain imaging reports of the Scottish population.
Project title: Natural Language Processing (NLP) in digital humanities and healthcare
During the IASH Sabbatical Fellowship, Dr. Alex will advance her research in NLP in the fields of digital humanities and healthcare. In digital humanities, she will prepare a UKRI grant application to develop Scottish Gaelic language technologies with the support of EPPC, nVidia, and the Scottish Government, and will explore EU Horizon funding to extend this work to other low-resource languages such as Irish, Welsh, and Basque. In healthcare, as a co-investigator on ADRC and the AIM-CISC project, Dr. Alex will enhance publication efforts and lay the groundwork for future research, collaborating with clinical experts to identify new use cases and develop strategies for clinical NLP grant applications.