Kenneth Church is a senior principal research scientist at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University and Professor of the Practice at Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has worked at AT&T, Microsoft, Hopkins, IBM and Baidu.

His work in computational linguistics includes web search, language modeling, text analysis, spelling correction, word-sense disambiguation, terminology, translation, lexicography, compression, optical character recognition, speech (recognition, synthesis, and diarisation), and more. He was an early advocate of empirical methods and a founder of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).

Kenneth was the president of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2012 and SIGDAT (the group that organizes EMNLP) from 1993 until 2011. He became an AT&T Fellow in 2001 and ACL Fellow in 2015.