Kathleen McKeown

Kathleen McKeown has had a transformative influence on the field of Natural Language Processing as a pioneer in the fields of automatic text generation and summarization. In her PhD thesis she introduced text generation, developing the notion of schemas, still the most widely used approach to planning content of automatically generated texts. Her second major contribution is the creation of the field of automatic text summarization, in particular introducing the concept of multi-document summarization, the condensation and integration of information about a single topic from diverse sources to create a coherent summary.