Rebecca Levitan
Associate Professor
Computer and Information Science
Location: 3114 Ingersoll Hall
Phone: 718.951.5000 x3997
Fax: 718.951.4842
Email:
Rivka Levitan is an associate professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research involves spoken language processing, discourse and human computer interaction. Previously, Rivka was a post-doc in the Speech Lab at Columbia University and received a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University. She has presented her work at international conferences including ACL, NAACL, Interspeech and Speech Prosody, and has received two Best Paper awards. She is an NSF CAREER award winner.
Education:
Ph.D., Columbia University - 2014 (Computer Science)
M.S., Columbia University - 2011 (Computer Science)
B.S., Brooklyn College - 2009 (Computer Science)
Areas of Expertise:
Natural language processing and spoken language processing. Specific areas of interest: prosody, dialogue, spoken dialogue systems, entrainment, computational linguistics
Books and Publications
A Weise, R Levitan. "Looking for structure in lexical and acoustic-prosodic entrainment behaviors." In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers). (Books and Publications: Article (Peer-reviewed)) 2018
G An, R Levitan. "Lexical and acoustic deep learning model for personality recognition." In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018. (Books and Publications: Article (Peer-reviewed)) 2018
G An, SI Levitan, J Hirschberg, R Levitan. "Deep Personality Recognition for Deception Detection." In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018, 421-425. (Books and Publications: Article (Peer-reviewed)) 2018
M Morales, S Scherer, R Levitan. "A linguistically-informed fusion approach for multimodal depression detection." In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Keyboard to Clinic. (Books and Publications: Article (Peer-reviewed)) 2018
S. Benus, M. Trnka, E. Kuric, L. Martak, A. Gravano, J. Hirschberg, R. Levitan. "Prosodic entrainment and trust in human-computer interaction." In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Speech Prosody, 13-16. June 2018, Poznań, Poland. (Books and Publications: Article (Peer-reviewed)) 2018
M Morales, S Scherer, R Levitan. "A cross-modal review of indicators for depression detection systems." In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology-From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality, 1-12. (Books and Publications: Article (Peer-reviewed)) 2017
MR Morales, S Scherer, R Levitan. "OpenMM: An Open-Source Multimodal Feature Extraction Tool." In Proceedings of Interspeech 2017, 3354-3358. (Books and Publications: Article (Peer-reviewed)) 2017
"Automatically Classifying Self-Rated Personality Scores from Speech." Guozhen An, Sarah Ita Levitan, Rivka Levitan, Andrew Rosenberg, Michelle Levine, Julia Hirschberg. In Proceedings of Interspeech. (Books and Publications: Article (Peer-reviewed)) 2016
"Combining Acoustic-Prosodic, Lexical, and Phonotactic Features for Automatic Deception Detection." Sarah Ita Levitan, Guozhen An, Min Ma, Rivka Levitan, Andrew Rosenberg, Julia Hirschberg. In Proceedings of Interspeech. (Books and Publications: Article (Peer-reviewed)) 2016
"Implementing Acoustic-Prosodic Entrainment in a Conversational Avatar." Rivka Levitan, ?tefan Beňu?, Ramiro H. Gálvez, Agustín Gravano, Florencia Savoretti, Marian Trnka, Andreas Weise, Julia Hirschberg. In Proceedings of Interspeech. (Books and Publications: Article (Peer-reviewed)) 2016
Michelle Morales and Rivka Levitan. "Speech vs. text: A comparative analysis of features for depression detection systems." In Proceedings of 2016 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT), 136-143. (Books and Publications: Article (Peer-reviewed)) 2016
Michelle Morales, Rivka Levitan. "Mitigating Confounding Factors in Depression Detection Using an Unsupervised Clustering Approach." In Proceedings of CHI 2016 Computing and Mental Health Workshop, 2016 (Books and Publications: Article (Peer-reviewed)) 2016
Sarah Ita Levitan, Yocheved Levitan, Guozhen An, Michelle Levine, Rivka Levitan, Andrew Rosenberg, Julia Hirschberg. "Identifying Individual Differences in Gender, Ethnicity, and Personality from Dialogue for Deception Detection." In Proceedings of NAACL HLT, 2016 (Books and Publications: Article (Peer-reviewed)) 2016
"Acoustic-prosodic entrainment in Slovak, Spanish, English and Chinese: A cross-linguistic comparison."
R Levitan, ? Benu?, A Gravano, J Hirschberg
16th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, 325 (Books and Publications: Article (Peer-reviewed)) 2015
"Backward mimicry and forward influence in prosodic contour choice in Standard American English."
A Gravano, ? Benu?, R Levitan, J Hirschberg
Sixteenth Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Books and Publications: Article (Peer-reviewed)) 2015
Levitan, R., S. Benus, A. Gravano and J. Hirschberg. "Entrainment and Turn-Taking in Human-Human Dialogue." Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium on Turn-Taking and Coordination in Human-Machine Interaction. (Books and Publications: Article (Peer-reviewed)) 2015
Awards, Honors and Fellowships
National Science Foundation Award IIS-1845710, February 2019 - January 2024. "CAREER: Developing an integrated model of speech entrainment." PI: Rebecca Levitan. $524,573.
(Grants and Fellowships) 2019
PSC-CUNY Research Award, Trad-B Project #62525-00 50, July 2019, "Handling intergroup variability to improve affect recognition in speech and text." PI: Rebecca Levitan. $5,938.42.
(Grants and Fellowships) 2019
IGERT: From Data to Solutions: A New PhD Program in Transformational Data & Information Sciences Research and Innovation. Co-PI. (Grants and Fellowships) 2016
PSC CUNY Award # 69696-00 47. Implementing acoustic-prosodic entrainment in a virtual conversational agent. (Grants and Fellowships) 2016
CRA-W Collaborative Research Experience for Undergraduates. "Investigating the prevalence of stereotypical female language in actual and movie conversations." (Grants and Fellowships) 2015
Conferences, Seminars and Symposiums
"Human-Machine Entrainment and Trust." Emotion AI Summit, Boston, September 2018. (Conferences, Seminars and Symposiums: Invited Talk) 2018
"Next Steps Towards Understanding Entrainment." Keynote speech, Workshop on Accommodation in Speech Communication, University of Zurich, Switzerland, December 2018. (Conferences, Seminars and Symposiums: Invited Talk) 2018
"Are these women real? Stereotypical female language in actual vs. movie dialogue." CIRCL: Connecting Innovative Research in CUNY Linguistics. CUNY Graduate Center. March 29, 2016. (Conferences, Seminars and Symposiums: Invited Talk) 2016
Panelist, 2nd Annual Girl Geek Dinner. April 14, 2016. (Conferences, Seminars and Symposiums: Invited Talk) 2016
"Does "women's language" exist? Bringing data to sociolinguistics." Columbia University IGERT Distinguished Speaker Series. September 11, 2015. (Conferences, Seminars and Symposiums: Invited Talk) 2015
"Entrainment and Turn-Taking in Human-Human Dialogue." AAAI Spring Symposium on Turn-Taking and Coordination in Human-Machine Interaction. Stanford University. Palo Alto, Calif., March 24. (Conferences, Seminars and Symposiums: Conference Presentation) 2015
Professional Leadership
Faculty Council Delegate from the School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences (Professional Leadership: Committee Service) 2019
Faculty Council Research Committee (Professional Leadership: Committee Service) 2019
Organizing committee member, New York Academy of Sciences NLP, Dialog and Speech Symposium (Professional Leadership: Organizational Leadership Position) 2019
Undergraduate Curriculum Committee (Brooklyn College Computer Science Department) (Professional Leadership: Committee Service) 2019
Faculty Council Delegate from the School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences (Professional Leadership: Committee Service) 2018
Faculty Council Research Committee (Professional Leadership: Committee Service) 2018
Undergraduate Curriculum Committee (Brooklyn College Computer Science Department) (Professional Leadership: Committee Service) 2018
Faculty Council Research Committee (Professional Leadership: Committee Service) 2017
Undergraduate Curriculum Committee (Brooklyn College Computer Science Department) (Professional Leadership: Committee Service) 2017
Program Committee, Interspeech 2016 (Professional Leadership: Committee Service) 2016
Program Committee, IWSDS 2016 (Professional Leadership: Committee Service) 2016
Program Committee, NAACL 2016 (Professional Leadership: Committee Service) 2016
Program Committee, ACL. (Professional Leadership: Committee Service) 2015
Program Committee, Interspeech 2015 (Professional Leadership: Committee Service) 2015
