Kathleen R. McKeown is an American computer scientist, specializing in natural language processing.

She is currently the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science and is the Founding Director of the Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering at Columbia University.

She has also served as Vice Dean for Research in the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

She has held the positions of President, Vice President, and Secretary-Treasurer of the Association for Computational Linguistics and has been a board member and secretary of the board of the Computing Research Association.

McKeown's research focuses on natural language processing and has included the Newsblaster multi-document summarization program to derive summary news stories from the contents of a number of news sites;[1][4] for a few years this included multilingual news.