Gina-Anne
Levow
Department of Linguistics
University of Washington
P.O. Box 354340
Padelford 201B
Seattle, WA 98195 USA
+1-206-616-5728 [Voice]
+1-206-685-7978 [Fax]
levow at uw dot edu
Formal Research Statement
Formal Teaching Statement
I'm an assistant professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Washington. 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.
During my post-doctoral research at University of Maryland, College Park, I became involved in cross-language and spoken document retrieval, focusing on the Chinese-English language pair. I also participated in a high-quality Chinese-English machine translation project.
I received my Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998.
My doctoral thesis explored recognizing spoken corrections in human-computer dialogue, relying on acoustic-prosodic features. My Master's thesis examined
discourse-neutral prosodic phrasing in Mandarin Chinese, analyzing the relationship between syntactic and prosodic structure.
In addition to the research I have performed in a university setting, I have also participated in projects at a variety of governmental and corporate research
laboratories. While at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, I designed and implemented an anaphora processing module
which was subsequently incorporated into several of the laboratory's textual and spoken natural language systems, including a mobile robot. At Sun Microsystems Laboratories, I was
a member of the team which developed SpeechActs, a proto-type speech-only spoken language interface to a collection of desktop applications and dynamic
data feeds. I also participated in a government-funded (NIST) research effort at Kurweil Applied Intelligence, Inc. to design tools for expanding spoken natural
language interfaces to a variety of applications, including that of a graphical design tool.
This year I'm Co-Chair of NW-NLP: The Northwest Regional NLP Workshop
When not hard at work recognizing tones or segmenting discourse, I enjoy gymnastics, T'ai Chi, and weight lifting.
I was a member of a competitive USGF gymnastics team for eight years, and began studying T'ai Chi during my year as a Rotary Fellow in Taiwan. I am fluent in
Mandarin Chinese and French.
Here is the family photo, our transplanted British cats, and more great cats.
Last Updated: May 2012