In this paper we present grammatical interpretations of the alternating Eulerian polynomials of types A and B. As applications, we derive several properties of the type B alternating Eulerian polynomials, including combinatorial expansions, recurrence relations and generating functions. We establish an interesting connection between alternating Eulerian polynomials of type B and left peak polynomials of permutations in the symmetric group, which implies that the type B alternating Eulerian polynomials have gamma-vectors alternate in sign.