Kathleen McKeown facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Kathleen McKeown
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| Institutions | Columbia University |
| Thesis | Generating natural language text in response to questions about database structure (1982) |
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Kathleen R. McKeown is a brilliant American computer scientist. She is an expert in something called natural language processing. This field teaches computers to understand and use human language. She works at Columbia University as a top professor. She also helped start a special center there for data science.
About Kathleen McKeown
Kathleen McKeown earned her first degree from Brown University in 1976. She then got her PhD in Computer Science in 1982. This was from the University of Pennsylvania. Her entire career has been spent at Columbia University.
She made history at Columbia. She was the first woman to become a tenured professor. This means she earned a permanent teaching position. She was also the first woman to lead the Computer Science Department. She held this important role from 1998 to 2003.
Her Important Work
Professor McKeown's main research area is natural language processing. This is often called NLP. It's all about how computers can understand, interpret, and create human language. Think about how your phone understands your voice commands. That's NLP at work!
One of her cool projects was called Newsblaster. This program could read many news stories from different websites. Then, it would create one summary news story. For a while, it even worked with news in different languages. This helped people quickly get the main ideas from many sources.
She has also held important leadership roles. She was the President, Vice President, and Secretary-Treasurer of the Association for Computational Linguistics. This is a big group for people who study language and computers.
Awards and Recognition
Kathleen McKeown has received many honors for her amazing work. These awards show how much her contributions have helped the field of computer science.
- 1985: She received the Presidential Young Investigator Award. This was from the National Science Foundation.
- 1991: She won the Faculty Award for Women. This also came from the National Science Foundation.
- 1994: She became a AAAI Fellow.
- 2003: She was named an ACM Fellow.
- 2010: She received the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award. This award celebrates women who make big impacts in technology.
- 2012: She became a founding Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
- 2019: She was chosen to be part of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
- 2022: She was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Her Published Works
Kathleen McKeown has written important books and papers. These share her knowledge with other scientists.
- Text Generation: Using Discourse Strategies and Focus Constraints to Generate Natural Language Text. This book is about how computers can create human-like text. It was first published in 1985.
- With Ani Nenkova: Automatic Summarization. This book explains how computers can automatically create summaries of long texts. It was published in 2011.
