Katherine A. Keith

  kak5 (at) williams (dot) edu

  curriculum vitae (CV)

I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Williams College. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Young Investigator at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. I received a PhD from the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in August 2021, and I am grateful to have been supported by a Bloomberg Data Science PhD Fellowship 2019-2021.

My work lies at the intersection natural language processing—helping computers understand, classify, and generate human language—and data science—finding patterns in data that help us better understand the world. Specifically, I work on methods and applications that help make quantitative conclusions from large-scale text-based datasets, aligning with the subfields of text-as-data and computational social science. I focus on language because it is one of the most salient forms of expressing thoughts, sharing ideas, and recording history. My work often involves collaborations with other scholars in political science, legal studies, education, sociology, and other social science fields.

Recently, my primary areas of research include:

• Expanding text-based causal inference methods [1] and empirical evaluation [2]
• Economics [3] and science-of-science [4] NLP applications
• Social NLP dataset curation [7] and evaluation [8]

Outside of research, I am also interested in projects that build bridges between natural language processing and the social sciences. In line with this goal, I have been an organizer of the NLP+CSS Workshops and Ian Stewart and I organized the NLP+CSS 201 Online Tutorial Series whose videos now have over 10K cummulative views on our YouTube channel.

Previously, I also hosted the podcast Diaries of Social Data Research with Lucy Li in which interdisciplinary scholars described the "behind the scenes" diaries of their published papers and tips for success.