Kenneth W Church

Kenneth W Church is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Northeastern University. He received his PhD from MIT in 1983 and has held positions at AT&T Bell Labs (20 years), Microsoft, Johns Hopkins University, IBM, and Baidu. He is the founder of VecML, a startup focused on vectors, machine learning, and approximate nearest neighbors for AI applications.

His research focuses on computational linguistics and large language models (LLMs), with applications including web search, language modeling, text analysis, spelling correction, word-sense disambiguation, terminology, translation, lexicography, compression, optical character recognition, speech recognition, synthesis, and diarization. He was an early advocate of empirical methods and founded the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).

• ACM Fellow (2023)
• ACL Fellow (2015)
• AT&T Fellow (2001)
• President of ACL (2012)
• President of ACL SIGDAT (1993-2011)

He teaches courses including CS6120: Practical Natural Language Processing and CS7290 at Northeastern University. As founder of VecML, he develops products for search, machine learning, chat, RAG and agentive systems available on mobile platforms.