Kathleen C. Fraser

Research Scientist, National Research Council Canada

Adjunct Professor, School of Computer Science, Carleton University

I work in the Text Analytics group on NLP and machine learning research. A large part of my research focuses on NLP for healthcare, particularly the detection of early signs of cognitive impairment from speech and language features. I am also active in the area of ethical AI, including explainability and bias detection. See below for more detail on my active research projects.

News and Announcements

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.

Explainability

Different frameworks for understanding why a machine learning model made the decision it did.

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@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca