Head of NLP at IBM Watsonx Orders, working to develop Conversational AI products. I love working at the intersection of applied NLP, research, and software engineering. I also enjoy building successful teams, teaching, and supporting others’ career development.

Before working in industry, I spent a decade in academia trying to understand how children learn to use language. I was a Postdoctoral researcher at UCLA with Anne S. Warlaumont in the Emergence of Communication Lab. And I completed my PhD at Stanford University, working with Michael Frank in the Language and Cognition Lab.

My research aimed to understand what makes humans such powerful learners. The guiding hypothesis is that people flexibly seek information to leverage rich input available in social learning environments. I used a combination of approaches including eye-tracking, web-based experiments, computational models, and analyses of large-scale, naturalistic datasets.

Representative publications:

  • MacDonald, K., Marchman V.A., Fernald, A., & Frank, M.C. (2020). Children flexibly seek visual information during signed and spoken language comprehension. [Preprint PDF] [code repository]

  • MacDonald, K. LaMarr, T., Corina, D., Marchman V.A., & Fernald, A. (2018). Real-time lexical comprehension in young children learning American Sign Language. Developmental Science [PDF] [Preprint PDF] [paper site] [code repository]

  • MacDonald, K., Yurovsky, D., & Frank, M.C. (2017). Social cues modulate the representations underlying cross-situational learning. Cognitive Psychology. 94, 67–84. [Preprint PDF] [code repository] [paper site]

  • MacDonald, K., Schug, M., Chase, E. & Barth, H. (2013). My people, right or wrong? Minimal group membership disrupts children’s selective trust in testimony. Cognitive Development, 28, 247-259. [PDF]