Kathleen C. Fraser

Associate Professor, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa

My research is in the area of natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI). I'm particularly interested in issues related to ethical AI and AI safety, including bias and fairness, social stereotypes, deception, manipulation, and model evaluation. A large part of my research also focuses on NLP for healthcare, particularly the detection of early signs of cognitive impairment from speech and language features.

News and Announcements

  • As of September 1, I will be taking a new job at University of Ottawa. Many fond farewells to my team at the NRC!
  • Check out our paper on detecting AI text on social media (ACL Findings 2025)
  • New work with Intel Labs on bias in large vision-language models at NAACL 2025
  • Our survey on detecting AI-generated text has been published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.
  • Check out this Nature news article featuring our work: AI image generators often give racist and sexist results: can they be fixed?

    • Current Projects

    Feel free to get in touch for more information or possible collaboration.

    Cognitive Decline

    Algorithms to automatically detect speech and language markers of cognitive or mental state.

    Stereotyping and Bias

    Examining stereotyping and bias in social media text and in machine learning models.

    AI Safety

    Evaluating frontier AI models and fine-tuned models for safety risks, and designing mitigations.

    Selected Publications

    For an up-to-date list of publications, please see my Google Scholar page.

    About

    Academic bio: Dr. Kathleen Fraser is a Research Officer in the Text Analytics group at the National Research Council in Ottawa, where she investigates language technologies for healthcare and social good. Her recent research has focused on social and ethical issues in natural language processing, such as identifying stereotypes and implicitly abusive language in social media text, as well as improving the interpretability and transparency of machine learning models. She is also active in developing methods to help detect early signs of cognitive decline from speech patterns and eye movements. Dr. Fraser completed a post doc at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden in 2018, where she worked on detecting mild cognitive impairment with behavioural markers and multimodal machine learning. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 2016, under the supervision of Graeme Hirst and Jed Meltzer, and was awarded the Governor General's Gold Academic Medal.

    Contact: kathleen.fraser@uottawa.ca