13 Facts About Julia Hirschberg

Julia Hirschberg is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computational linguistics and natural language processing.

Julia Hirschberg served on the History faculty of Smith College from 1974 to 1982.

Julia Hirschberg was promoted to Department Head in 1994 when she created a new Human Computer Interface Research Lab.

Julia Hirschberg served as Chair of the Computer Science Department from 2012 to 2018.

Julia Hirschberg's research has included prosody, discourse structure, spoken dialogue systems, speech search, and more recently analysis of deceptive speech.

Julia Hirschberg was among the first to combine Natural Language Processing approaches to discourse and dialogue with speech research.

Julia Hirschberg 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 TTS systems.

Julia Hirschberg was a leader in the development of the ToBI conventions for intonational description, which have been extended to numerous languages and which today are the most widely used standard for intonational annotation.

Julia Hirschberg has been a pioneer together with Gregory Ward in much experimental work on intonational sources of language meaning and how these interact with pragmatic phenomena, particularly on the meaning of accent items and the meaning of intonational contours.

Julia Hirschberg holds several patents in TTS and in speech search.

Julia Hirschberg has served on numerous technical boards and editorial committees, and is on the Computing Research Association's Board of Directors and serves as co-chair of CRA-W.

Julia Hirschberg is noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing.

Julia Hirschberg has served as a member of the CRA Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research CRA-W since 2010.