Gina-Anne Levow

Gina-Anne Levow

Former Faculty
Department of Computer Science

Contact Information

University of Chicago
1100 E 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Office: Ry 166
Phone: (773)702-5680
Fax: (773)702-8487
levow@cs.uchicago.edu

Personal Homepage

http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~levow

Research

My research concentrates on the use of intonation in spoken dialog and my interests range over natural language processing, spoken language systems, and human-computer interfaces.

My current work focuses on the effects of context on tone and intonation. This research develops a broader-context, articulatorily-motivated model of tone, utilizing a common framework across a range of language and tone typologies including Bantu languages, Chinese dialects, and English. Through unsupervised and weakly supervised machine learning, this work aims to automatically identify tone and pitch accent in natural speech. My work further aims to understand and exploit the synergistic interaction of discourse structure and spoken intonation. To this end, I have developed computational techniques that can automatically detect topic changes in monologue and dialogue as well as corrections in human-computer spoken interactions. The improved techniques for modeling and recognition of tone and intonation developed in this work will allow computational spoken language understanding systems to more fully exploit the information carried by pitch.

I also have continuing interests in information retrieval in text and speech across a range of languages, in domains from news to medicine.

Technical Reports

TR-2006-05
Local Rhyme-based Acoustic Features for Mandarin Tone Recognition. Dinoj Surendran; Gina-Anne Levow. 25 May, 2006. Communicated by Gina-Anne Levow.