[1] Hirschberg was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2017 for contributions to the use of prosody in text-to-speech and spoken dialogue systems, and to audio browsing and retrieval.
Upon graduation from University of Pennsylvania in 1985, Hirschberg joined AT&T Bell Labs as a Member of Technical staff in the Linguistics Research Department, where she worked on improving prosody assignment for Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS) in the Bell Labs TTS system.
[2] Hirschberg was among the first to combine Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches to discourse and dialogue with speech research.
She pioneered techniques in text analysis for prosody assignment in Text-to-Speech synthesis at Bell laboratories in the 1980s and 1990s, developing corpus-based statistical models based upon syntactic and discourse information which are in general use today in TTS systems.
[7][8] She also has innovated in numerous other areas involving prosody and meaning, including the role of grammatical function and surface position in pitch accent location,[9] the use of prosody in disambiguating cue phrases (discourse markers) with Diane Litman,[10] the role of prosody in disambiguation in English, Italian, and Spanish with Cinzia Avesani and Pilar Prieto,[11] and the automatic identification of speech recognition errors using prosodic information,[12] At AT&T Labs she worked with Fernando Pereira, Steve Whittaker, and others on speech search[13] and developing new interfaces for speech navigation.