Kathy McKeown
I am a professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University in New York City .
My interests lie in the area of natural language processing and in particular, natural language generation. We are currently working in three main areas. The first, summary generation, involves the generation of natural language text, or summaries, from data such as stock market statistics. We are also have a number of projects on text summarization. We are working on a generating summary updates over live multimedia information, on domain independent generation of summaries using a combination of statistical and linguistic techniques, and on generation of summaries across multiple, medical articles. In the second, statistical natural language, we are using statistical analysis of large text corpora to identify constraints on how words are used. Such results can be used to automate the development of a lexicon, or dictionary. Finally, we are also working on the generation of multimedia explanation, developing techniques to coordinate language and graphics, to produce explanations in the context of a human computer interface for medical information. Part of our interest here is on the generation of spoken language and differences with generation of text.
Kathleen R. McKeown is the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. She served as Department Chair from 1998-2003. Her research interests include text summarization, natural language generation, multi-media explanation, digital libraries, concept to speech generation and natural language interfaces. McKeown received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982 and has been at Columbia since then. In 1985 she received a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, in 1991 she received a National Science Foundation Faculty Award for Women, in 1994 was selected as a AAAI Fellow, and in 2003 was elected as an ACM Fellow. McKeown is also quite active nationally. She serves as a board member of the Computing Research Association and serves as secretary of the board. She served as President of the Association of Computational Linguistics in 1992, Vice President in 1991, and Secretary Treasurer for 1995-1997. She has served on the Executive Council of the Association for Artificial Intelligence and was co-program chair of their annual conference in 1991.