Hearst also developed early work in automatic segmentation of text into topical discourse boundaries, inventing a now well-known approach called TextTiling.

[13] Her Flamenco research project investigated and developed the now widely used faceted navigation approach for searching and browsing web sites and information collections.

[12] Hearst is an Edge Foundation contributing author and a member of the Usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

[17] She became a member of the CHI Academy in 2017, and has previously served as president of the Association for Computational Linguistics and on the advisory council of NSF's CISE Directorate.

[18] Additionally, she has been a member of the Web Board for CACM, the Usage Panel for the American Heritage Dictionary, the Edge.org panel of experts, the research staff at Xerox PARC, and the boards of ACM Transactions on the Web, Computational Linguistics, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, and IEEE Intelligent Systems.