I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Hunter College. Also, I was a member of the doctoral faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center, for both Computer Science and Linguistics PhD Programs. (https://cra.org/cra-wp/highlight-on-alum-sarah-ita-levitan/)

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.