1. Personal & Academic Information
Kathy McKeown is a leading American computer scientist specializing in natural language processing (NLP), text summarization, natural language generation, and multilingual applications. She has been a long-time faculty member at Columbia University and has held key leadership roles in departments and national research communities.
2. Education
Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Pennsylvania, 1982.
M.S., Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, 1979.
A.B., Comparative Literature, Brown University, 1976.
3. Professional Experience
Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University.
Founding Director, Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering, Columbia University (2012–2017).
Chair, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University (1998–2003).
Vice Dean for Research, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Columbia University.
4. Research Interests
McKeown’s research encompasses major areas of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, including:
Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Generation.
Automatic Text Summarization and Multimedia Explanation.
Question Answering and Multilingual Applications.
Big Data and Social Media Analysis.
5. Honors & Professional Recognition
Kathy McKeown has been widely recognized throughout her career, including:
Fellow, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 1994.
Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2003.
Founding Fellow, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2012.
Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2019.
Member, American Philosophical Society, 2022.
NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, National Science Foundation.
Anita Borg Women of Vision Award in Innovation, for work on text summarization, 2010.
6. Scholarly Contributions
Professor McKeown is a highly cited researcher with seminal contributions to core NLP technologies, including work on multidocument summarization (e.g., Newsblaster) and generative models of text. Her research continues to influence modern approaches to summarization, generation, and data-driven language understanding.
Her doctoral students include notable NLP researchers such as Regina Barzilay and Ani Nenkova.
7. Selected Publications & Impact
McKeown has authored/co-authored numerous influential papers and served on editorial boards and conference leadership in NLP and AI. She has published extensively on approaches to summarization and generation across major venues in computational linguistics and machine learning.
Google Scholar Profile:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=ujDhg2sAAAAJ