Julia Bell Hirschberg

Julia Hirschberg was among the first to combine Natural Language Processing approaches to discourse and dialogue with speech research. She pioneered techniques in text analysis for prosody assignment in Text-to-Speech synthesis at Bell Laboratories in the 1980s and 1990s, developing corpus-based statistical models based upon syntactic and discourse information which are in general use today in text-to-speech (TTS) systems. She joined the Columbia faculty as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science in 2002. She and her students have continued and extended research on spoken dialogue systems; on the automatic classification of trust, charisma, deception and emotion from speech; on speech summarization; prosody translation, hedging behavior in text and speech, text-to-speech synthesis, and speech search in low resource languages. She also holds several patents in TTS and in speech search. She now serves on the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee, the Executive Board of the CRA, the AAAI Council, the Executive Board of the NAACL, and the board of the CRA-W. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2014 and as an Honorary Member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology in the same year.

Julia Hirschberg serves as an Advisory Committee Member.