PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Keith Hall

Also known as Keith B. Hall

Keith Hall is a natural language processing researcher whose work runs from parsing speech to dense text retrieval. He received a PhD from Brown University in 2005, served as a Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University, and joined Google as a research scientist. In 2013, he was one of thirteen authors of Universal Dependency Annotation for Multilingual Parsing, which won the ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award in 2023. His later papers include Sentence-T5, Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers and Promptagator in 2021 and 2022, followed by OpenMSD, a multilingual dataset of scientific papers, in 2023.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2004–2005

    PhD at Brown University

    He coauthors Attention Shifting for Parsing Speech with Mark Johnson in 2004, presented at the ACL meeting in Barcelona. He receives his PhD from Brown University in 2005 and serves as a Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University before moving to Google.

  2. 2007

    K-best spanning tree parsing

    His single-author paper K-best Spanning Tree Parsing appears at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics in Prague in 2007.

  3. 2010–2011

    Structured perceptron and parser transfer

    As a Google research scientist, he coauthors Distributed Training Strategies for the Structured Perceptron with Ryan McDonald and Gideon Mann in 2010. A 2011 paper with McDonald and Slav Petrov, Multi-Source Transfer of Delexicalized Dependency Parsers, appears at the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing in Edinburgh.

  4. 2013

    Universal dependency annotation

    In 2013, he is one of thirteen authors of Universal Dependency Annotation for Multilingual Parsing, presented at ACL. He also co-chairs the ACL 2013 tutorial program with Johan Bos.

  5. 2020

    The Dakshina dataset

    The Dakshina dataset, which he coauthors in 2020, offers text in both the Latin and native scripts for 12 South Asian languages.

  6. 2021–2022

    Dense retrieval and sentence embeddings

    In 2021, he coauthors Sentence-T5, which extracts sentence embeddings from T5 models, and Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers, which finds that scaling up dual encoders improves out-of-domain retrieval. In 2022, he coauthors Promptagator, which builds task-specific dense retrievers from no more than 8 examples.

  7. 2023

    An ACL Test-of-Time award

    In 2023, the ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award goes to Universal Dependency Annotation for Multilingual Parsing, one of two papers honored from 2013.

  8. 2023–2024

    OpenMSD for scientific papers

    He coauthors OpenMSD in 2023, a dataset of 74 million papers in 103 languages and 778 million citation pairs for multilingual scientific document similarity. The paper appears at LREC-COLING 2024 in Torino.

Career

  1. 2010–2011GoogleResearch Scientist
  2. Johns Hopkins UniversityResearch Professor

Education

  1. 2005Brown UniversityPhD

From the biography.

  1. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  2. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  3. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Google. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.
  4. Google alumni have founded or led 133 other organizations, more than any other AI labIncludes Google. We estimate that alumni of 17 major AI labs went on to found or lead 350 other organizations, including 226 they founded, and we trace 472 career moves directly between 23 labs since 2010.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Keith Hall yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Keith B. Hall - Research at Google research.google.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Attention Shifting for Parsing Speech - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. K-best Spanning Tree Parsing - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Distributed Training Strategies for the Structured Perceptron - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Multi-Source Transfer of Delexicalized Dependency Parsers - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Universal Dependency Annotation for Multilingual Parsing - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. [Corpora-List] ACL-2013: call for tutorials listserv.linguistlist.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Processing South Asian Languages Written in the Latin Script: the Dakshina Dataset arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Sentence-T5: Scalable Sentence Encoders from Pre-trained Text-to-Text Models arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. Promptagator: Few-shot Dense Retrieval From 8 Examples arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  12. Announcement of the 2023 ACL Test-of-Time Paper Award aclweb.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  13. OpenMSD: Towards Multilingual Scientific Documents Similarity Measurement arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  14. OpenMSD: Towards Multilingual Scientific Documents Similarity Measurement - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 21 October 2026.