Kathleen R. McKeown’s interest lie in the areas of natural language process, summarization, natural language generation, and social media. Her research interests include text summarization, natural language generation, multi-media explanation, question-answering, and multi-lingual applications. Currently, her group is working in three main areas: text summarization of disaster updates, personalized messaging to help reduce energy use, and identifying sentiment in social media posts.
McKeown’s work on disaster updates makes use of live, streaming information over each hour in the course of a disaster. This project incorporates personal experiences of those who have lived through a disaster, thus providing both an objective and personal point of view.
In the realm of social media, she has previously developed systems to identify influence in social media and to identify an author's personal traits. She is now working on identifying sentiment in social media posts made in low resource languages (e.g., Uyghur) and on identifying aggression and loss in posts from gang-involved youths from Chicago.
- Founding Director, Data Science Institute, Columbia University, 2012–2017
- Department Chair, Computer Science, 1998-2003
- Vice Dean for Research, dates?
- Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science, date?
- Association of Computational Linguistics, served as President, Vice President, and Secretary-Treasurer
- Computing Research Association, served as board member and secretary of the board
- Selected as one of the Founding Fellows of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2012
- Anita Borg Women of Vision Award in Innovation for work on text summarization, 2010
- Columbia Great Teacher Award, 2010
- Elected as an ACM Fellow, 2003
- Selected as AAAI Fellow, 1994
- National Science Foundation Faculty Award for Women, 1991
- National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, 1985