Kenneth Church

About

Kenneth Church is a professor of the practice with an affiliate appointment in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Silicon Valley. He is a senior principal research scientist at Northeastern's Institute for Experiential AI. Church's research focuses on natural language processing and information retrieval, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Before joining Northeastern in 2022, he worked as a scientist at Baidu, a researcher at IBM, and a scientist at Johns Hopkins University. He was recognized as a Baidu Fellow in 2018, an Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Fellow in 2015, and served as president of ACL in 2012. His publication record includes contributions to prominent conferences and journals such as NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, the Journal of Natural Language Engineering, and Frontiers Interspeech. Outside of academic research, he enjoys chess and hiking. He is the great-grandson of the inventor of a method still used today to predict stream runoff from mountain ranges across the west, as well as floods and droughts.

Research topics

• Natural Language Processing
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Programming language
• Linguistics
• Speech recognition

Selected publications

• Using Statistics in Lexical Analysis

  Psychology Press eBooks · 2021 · 466 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter discusses a number of statistical tools and shows some examples of how these tools can be used to enhance productivity of a human trying to solve one of these problems. It begins by introducing two statistics, mutual information and the t-score. British lexicographers, especially those working on dictionaries for foreign learners, are beginning to depend heavily on machine-readable corpora. They use these corpora and the basic concordancing tool mentioned above to fill in detailed s…

  DOI

• Disfluencies and Fine-Tuning Pre-Trained Language Models for Detection of Alzheimer’s Disease

  Interspeech 2022 · 2020 · 108 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Emerging trends: When can users trust GPT, and when should they intervene?

  Natural Language Engineering · 2024-01-16 · 19 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Usage of large language models and chat bots will almost surely continue to grow, since they are so easy to use, and so (incredibly) credible. I would be more comfortable with this reality if we encouraged more evaluations with humans-in-the-loop to come up with a better characterization of when the machine can be trusted and when humans should intervene. This article will describe a homework assignment, where I asked my students to use tools such as chat bots and web search to write a…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Are Generative Language Models Multicultural? A Study on Hausa Culture and Emotions using ChatGPT

  2024-01-01 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• From PMI to Bots

  International Journal of Lexicography · 2025-03-31 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract My paper with Patrick Hanks on PMI (pointwise mutual information) was the most successful paper I ever wrote, or ever will write. I believe the paper was successful because it appealed to a number of different audiences for a number of different purposes. Patrick Hanks was more interested in applications in lexicography and I was more interested in applications in engineering. The first section on background will discuss the role our PMI paper played in moving computational linguistics…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• SBIR Phase II: Thin Film Deposition & Dynamic Characterizations Using Sub-Psec Eximer Laser Sources

  NSF · $400k · 2000–2003

Frequent coauthors

• William A. Gale

  University of Adelaide

  29 shared

• Valia Kordoni

  Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

  28 shared

• Mark Liberman

  27 shared

• Stuart K. Williams

  Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

  26 shared

• James B. Hoying

  26 shared

• Jeffery A. Weiss

  Nscrypt (United States)

  25 shared

• Lowell T. Edgar

  Imperial College London

  25 shared

• Sara S. Nunes

  University Health Network

  25 shared

Labs

• Kenneth Church LabPI

Education

• PhD, EECS

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1983

Awards & honors

• Baidu Fellow (2018)
• Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Fellow (2015…
• served as president of ACL in 2012

Similar researchers at Northeastern University

• Yun Raymond Fuh-79
• Robin Waltersh-75
• Stacy C. Marsellah-62