Machine Learning Seminar: Kathleen McKeown (Columbia Univ. CS Dept.)

The large amount of language available online today makes it possible to think about how to use natural language processing to help address needs faced by society. In this talk, I will describe research in our group on summarization and sentiment analysis that addresses several different challenges. We have developed approaches that can be used to help people live and work in today's global world, providing access to information only available in low resource languages, approaches to help determine where problems lie following a disaster, and approaches to identify when the social media posts of gang-involved youth in Chicago express either aggression or loss.
Kathleen R. McKeown is the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and the Founding Director of the Data Science Institute. She served as Director from 2012 to 2017. In earlier years, she served as Department Chair from 1998-2003 and as Vice Dean for Research for the School of Engineering and Applied Science for two years. A leading scholar and researcher in the field of natural language processing, McKeown focuses her research on big data; her interests include text summarization, question answering, natural language generation, and multilingual applications. She has received numerous honors and awards, including AAAI Fellow, a Founding Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics and an ACM Fellow.