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

• Scholar API: Search and Recommendations for Academic Search

  2026-02-16

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  There has been considerable work on Academic Search. Academic Search is widely used; in addition to recommending papers to read, authors need to find papers they should cite, and program committees and funding agencies need to assign submissions to reviewers that are well-informed and sympathetic to the topic area. High-quality recommendations impact reviews, publication quality, and move a field into new directions.

  PublisherDOI

• Emerging trends: Supercomputers and clouds are so last century

  Natural language processing. · 2026-03-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Over the next decade, I expect more and more computing on phones and small computers and less on clouds and supercomputers. Supercomputers are super impressive to engineers, but not to economists because economies of scale have more to do with the size of the market than the size of the machine. Clouds are like wire-wrapped Cray computers; they were never designed for mass production. There was never much supply or demand. Supercomputers and clouds are too expensive and burn too much power. The future is more promising for phones because the market is larger. In addition, there are a number of other advantages to computing on phones and small (commodity) machines designed for mass markets: privacy, power, size, weight, latency, bandwidth, and especially affordability.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Rapid Prototyping for AI-Based Applications: A Hands-on Tutorial for Connecting the Dots

  Lecture notes in computer science · 2025-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Direct Digital Manufacturing for Laser-Drilled Vias in Multilayer Glass Printed Circuit Structures

  2025-05-27

  articleSenior author

  As next-generation electronics continue to evolve, new challenges arise in material compatibility, thermal management, and high-frequency performance. The increasing demand for compact, high-performance devices requires advancements in fabrication techniques to enable multi-layer integration on non-traditional substrates. High-frequency applications, such as 6G and beyond, necessitate smoother surfaces and precise feature resolution to minimize signal loss and optimize RF performance. Additionally, materials must withstand extreme operating conditions, including high temperatures, while maintaining conductivity and structural integrity. Additive Manufactured Electronics (AME) combined with laser micromachining presents a promising approach to address these challenges. This work explores the fabrication of multi-layer circuits on borosilicate glass substrates, leveraging laser-drilled vias and the additive deposition of high-temperature conductive materials. By integrating vision-based alignment systems and optimizing material selection, this process enables precise multilayer fabrication while ensuring electrical reliability. Electrical analysis is conducted on the trace and via developments. The development of a functional, multilayer glass circuit is then presented.

  PublisherDOI

• Design and Experimental Demonstration of an X-Band Hemispherically-Shaped Conformal Frequency Selective Surface

  2025-07-13

  article

  A technique to design hemispherically shaped conformal frequency selective surfaces (FSS) is presented. The technique utilizes a Goldberg polyhedron discretization resulting in hexagonal unit cells. The hexagonal unit cells are populated with a multilayered stack of three metallic claddings separated by dielectric spacers. The arrangement forms a passband covering the X-band. A geometrical scaling technique is used to compensate for varying unit cell dimensions associated with the Goldberg polyhedron. Full-wave simulations of the conformal FSS show excellent agreement with the theoretical performance predicted by unit cell simulations. The FSS was fabricated using a 5-axis additive manufacturing technique using ABS plastic and conductive silver paste. Measured results show good agreement throughout the passband. A special postprocessing technique was developed to synthesize an effective Gaussian beam illumination from far field data. The technique provides improved agreement in the stopband where edge diffraction can be significant in the ideally zero field region.

  PublisherDOI

• 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 from Rationalism to Empiricism. The second section will connect the dots between PMI and much of the recent excitement in Artificial Intelligence over bots like DeepSeek and large language models (LLMs).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Emerging trends: This is not cheating

  Natural language processing. · 2025-10-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Everyone is talking about bots. Much of the discussion has focused on downsides. It is too easy to use bots to cheat, but there are also many ways to use bots to improve your writing. Good writers use thesauruses. It is not cheating to use bots as a modern version of a thesaurus. It is also not cheating to use recommendation systems in a responsible way.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Comparable Corpora: Opportunities for New Research Directions

  ArXiv.org · 2025-01-24

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Most conference papers present new results, but this paper will focus more on opportunities for the audience to make their own contributions. This paper is intended to challenge the community to think more broadly about what we can do with comparable corpora. We will start with a review of the history, and then suggest new directions for future research. This was a keynote at BUCC-2025, a workshop associated with Coling-2025.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• HausaNLP: Current Status, Challenges and Future Directions for Hausa Natural Language Processing

  2025-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Ibrahim Said Ahmad, Idris Abdulmumin, Falalu Ibrahim Lawan, Sukairaj Hafiz Imam, Yusuf Aliyu, Sani Abdullahi Sani, Ali Usman Umar, Tajuddeen Gwadabe, Kenneth Church, Vukosi Marivate. Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on African Natural Language Processing (AfricaNLP 2025). 2025.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Design, Fabrication, and Measurement of a Hemispherical Multi-Layer Band-Pass Frequency Selective Surface

  ArXiv.org · 2025-11-20 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  A hemispherical multilayer wide-band (7-13 GHz) band-pass frequency selective surface (FSS) is reported. A new design technique based on a Goldberg discretization and unit cell scaling technique is introduced to accommodate the curved profile of the FSS. The FSS is additively manufactured by sequentially printing dielectric layers and metallic patterns until 3 patterned silver-ink surfaces are integrated within a 4.5 mm (${λ_0}/6$ at 10 GHz) thick ABS hemispherical radome. The diameter and the height of the realized hemispherical FSS are around $5{λ_0}$ and $3{λ_0}$ respectively. Measurements demonstrate a roughly 1.7 dB insertion loss in the passband and 15-20 dB rejection in the stop-band. Additionally, a new postprocessing technique is used to suppress the effects of edge diffraction in the measured transmission spectrum. The design process, manufacturing technique, and measurement postprocessing represent novel advancements enabling future conformal frequency selective surfaces.

  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