Julia Hirschberg facts for kids

Julia Hirschberg is an American computer scientist. She is famous for her work in computational linguistics and natural language processing. These fields help computers understand and use human language.

She first earned a PhD in history from the University of Michigan. Later, she earned a second PhD in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focused on how computers can process human language.

From 1985 to 2002, she worked at Bell Labs and AT&T Bell Labs. Since 2002, she has been a professor at Columbia University. She holds a special title there: the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science.

Her Life and Career

Julia Linn Bell Hirschberg was born in Liberty, Missouri. She first studied history. In 1976, she earned her first PhD in history from the University of Michigan. Her studies focused on 16th-century Mexico.

From 1974 to 1982, she taught history at Smith College. After that, she decided to study computer science. She earned her Master's degree in Computer and Information Science in 1982. Then, she completed her second PhD in Computer and Information Science in 1985. Both degrees were from the University of Pennsylvania.

Working at Bell Labs

After finishing her studies in 1985, Dr. Hirschberg joined AT&T Bell Labs. She worked in the Linguistics Research Department. There, she helped improve how computers speak. This is called Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS). She worked on making the computer's voice sound more natural.

In 1994, she became a Department Head. She created a new lab focused on how people interact with computers. Her team stayed at Bell Labs until 1996. Then, they moved to AT&T Labs Research due to a company change.

Teaching at Columbia University

In 2002, Dr. Hirschberg joined Columbia University as a professor. She teaches in the Department of Computer Science. From 2012 to 2018, she was the Chair of the Computer Science Department.

Today, she still teaches classes about speech and natural language. She also guides many PhD students. She helps them with their research projects.

What She Studies

Dr. Hirschberg's research explores many interesting topics. She studies how we use our voices to add meaning to words. This is called prosody. She also looks at how conversations are structured. She studies how people understand things that are not directly said.

Her work includes making computers speak more naturally. This is Text-to-Speech synthesis. She also works on making computers summarize spoken words. She helps create systems that can talk with people. She studies how emotions, honesty, and charisma show up in speech.

Early Discoveries

Dr. Hirschberg was one of the first to combine two fields. She brought together Natural Language Processing (NLP) and speech research. NLP helps computers understand human language.

In the 1980s and 1990s, she pioneered new ways to make computers speak. She developed methods to assign prosody (the rhythm and tone of speech) to computer-generated voices. These methods use statistical models based on how we structure sentences. They are still used in many Text-to-Speech systems today.

With another scientist, Janet Pierrehumbert, she created a model for understanding intonation. Intonation is the rise and fall of our voice. She also helped create the ToBI conventions. These are rules for describing intonation. They are used worldwide to study how people speak different languages.

Current Research

Dr. Hirschberg has done a lot of experimental work. She studies how the sound of our voice changes the meaning of what we say. She looks at how we use accents and different voice patterns.

She has explored many areas related to prosody and meaning. For example, she studied how grammar affects where we place emphasis in a sentence. She also worked on how prosody helps us understand tricky phrases. She even looked at how prosody helps identify errors in speech recognition.

At AT&T Labs, she worked on searching through spoken words. She also helped create new ways to navigate using speech. At Columbia, she and her students continue to research spoken dialogue systems. They work on making these systems better at understanding us. They also study how to detect trust, charisma, and emotion from speech.

Her team also works on summarizing speech and translating prosody. They study how people use vague language in text and speech. She holds several patents for her inventions in speech technology. She and her colleagues have collected important speech recordings. These include the Boston Directions Corpus and the Columbia Games Corpus.

Dr. Hirschberg has also served on many important committees. She has helped lead efforts to get more people involved in computer science.

Awards and Honors

Dr. Hirschberg has received many important awards for her work. Here are some of them:

• She was elected a member of the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence in 2025. She also received their Artificial Intelligence Exploration Award.
• She was elected a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA) in 2024.
• She received the ISCA Special Service Medal in 2020.
• She received an Honorary Doctorate from Tilburg University in the Netherlands in 2018.
• She became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.
• She was named an IEEE Fellow in 2017.
• She became a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2017.
• She was named an ACM Fellow in 2015.
• She became a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2014.
• She was named an Honorary member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology in 2014.
• She became a founding Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2011.
• She received the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Medal for Scientific Achievement in 2011.
• She received the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award in 2011.
• She received an Honorary Doctorate from KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2007.
• She was named an AAAI Fellow in 1994.