Sarah Ita Levitan

sarah.levitan [AT] hunter [DOT] cuny [DOT] edu

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Hunter College.
I am also a member of the doctoral faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center, for both Computer Science and Linguistics PhD Programs.

My research interests are in spoken language processing, which aims to teach computers to understand human speech. I am especially interested in paralinguistics, the study of non-verbal aspects of speech. I use computational approaches to extract and analyze acoustic-prosodic and lexical features to learn information about a speaker or their speech. My recent projects include detecting deceptive and trustworthy language, detecting misinformation and hate speech on social media, and understanding and predicting radicalization online.

I was previously a Postdoctoral Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University. I obtained my PhD in Computer Science at Columbia University in 2019, advised by Dr. Julia Hirschberg. My PhD was funded through an NSF-GRFP fellowship and an NSF IGERT fellowship.

Publications

Presentations

  • Individual Differences in Deception and Deception Detection in Spoken Dialogue
    Sarah Ita Levitan and Julia Hirschberg
    Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning (MASC-SLL) 2016

  • Novel Feature Representation for Automatic Gender Identification from Speech
    Sarah Ita Levitan, Taniya Mishra and Srinivas Bangalore
    10th Annual Machine Learning Symposium, 2016

  • Entrainment in Supreme Court Oral Arguments
    Sarah Ita Levitan, Rivka Levitan and Julia Hirschberg
    Grace Hopper Conference 2012

Teaching

Hunter Speech Lab

    PhD Students

  • Yuwen Yu (CS, 2nd yr)
  • Mohammad "Shayan" Shokri (CS, 2nd yr)
  • Natasha Tyulina (Linguistics, QP2 mentor)

    • MS Students

  • Drew Lee (CS)
  • Rebecca Kleinbart (CS)
  • Tyler Lanni (Linguistics)
  • Mariana Graterol (Linguistics)

    • Undergraduate Students

  • Nicholas Cheung (CS)
  • Ghazanfar Shahbaz (CS)

    • Funding

  • National Science Foundation EAGER. "Exploring the role of acoustic-prosodic, lexical, and demographic factors in trustworthy speech perception for conversational agents." 2023-2024. PI. $98,140

  • Google Cyber NYC. "News or opinion: Fine-grained analysis of text data to inform online readers." 2023-2024. PI. $80,000

  • National Science Foundation. "AI Institute for Artificial and Natural Intelligence (ARNI)." 2023-2028. Senior Personnel. $20,000,000

  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research. "Automatic detection and analysis of extremist video content on social media using text, speech, and visual features." 2020-2023. Co-PI. $764,199

  • PSC-CUNY. "Cross-domain analysis and classification of deceptive language." 2021. PI. $5,951

  • Brown Institute for Media Innovation Seed Grant. "Automatic identification of online harassment of women journalists." 2020. PI. $20,000

  • Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Knight News Innovation Fellowship. "Linguistic indicators of trust in written news." 2018. PI. $39,000