Before joining the University of Pittsburgh, she was an assistant professor at Columbia University. She additionally held the position of a research scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Principles Research Department Laboratory at
AT&T Labs. Litman has held the position of Chair of the
North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics two times, elected twice for the position, whose tenure lasts four years. She is also a distinguished member of the executive committee of the
Association for Computational Linguistics, and a member of the editorial boards of
Computational Linguistics and User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction. She has also held the position of Leverhulme Professor at the
University of Edinburgh. the 2006 SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, and at the 2008 Symposium of the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour. She also sits on the board of the several interest groups, including the
International Speech Communication Association's Special Interest Group on Speech and Language Technology in Education. Litman has served as chair, organizer, and a senior member of numerous committees of peer-reviewed scientific journals. ==Awards and recognition==