The United States Supreme Court plays a key role in defining the legal basis for gender discrimination throughout the country, yet there are few checks on gender bias within the court itself. In conversational turn-taking, interruptions have been documented as a marker of bias between speakers of different genders. The goal of this study is to automatically differentiate between respectful and disrespectful conversational turns taken during official hearings, which could help in detecting bias and finding remediation techniques for discourse in the courtroom. In this paper, I present a corpus of turns annotated by legal professionals, and describe the design of a semi-supervised classifier that will use acoustic and lexical features to analyze turn-taking at scale. On completion of annotations, this classifier will be trained to extract the likelihood that turns are respectful or disrespectful for use in studies of speech trends.

We present a web-based system that facilitates the exploration of complex morphological patterns found in morphologically very rich languages. The need for better understanding of such patterns is urgent for linguistics and important for cross-linguistically applicable natural language processing. In this paper we give an overview of the system architecture and describe a sample case study on Abui [abz], a Trans-New Guinea language spoken in Indonesia.