Hope McGovern

I am a final-year Computer Science PhD student and Woolf Institute Scholar at the University of Cambridge. Previously, I was a Fulbright Scholar in Austria, working in Applied Physics, before I jumped ship to NLP. I hold an MPhil (Master’s) in Computer Science from Cambridge, and an Sc.B. (Bachelor’s) in Engineering Physics from Brown University.

My research focus is understanding how narratives communicate meaning through reused symbols and structures. Deep learning plays a prominent role in my work, both in surfacing underexplored narrative patterns like type-scene and chiasmus, as well as characterizing how well rhetorical structures are maintained in translation. My work is deeply influenced by Marvin Minksy’s Frame Theory of Knowledge and Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative. Research questions that interest me tend to touch natural language generation (NLG), machine translation (NMT), AI explainability, and narrative theory.

I am looking for a full-time industry position in London after I finish my PhD in the Spring of 2025! You can see my full CV here.

During my PhD, I’ve been an intern at Grammarly, working with Dimi Alikaniotis and Yoshi Suhara on LLM-generated text detection with stylometrics [paper link], and a Research Scholar at the Summer Camp for Applied Language Exploration (SCALE) at the Johns Hopkins Human Language Technology Center of Excellence.

Beyond Academics

I’m only one country away from completing the ‘30 countries by 30’ challenge!

I collect folk instruments from places I travel and learn to play at least one song on each. Perhaps my favourite collected item is an Appalachian dulcimer from North Carolina.

As an undergraduate, I wrote for, photographed for, and was Chief Copy Editor of a student-run literary arts magazine called ‘Cornerstone’. I’m most proud of this creative non-fiction piece musing about my favourite concept from physics: entropy.

Latest News

  • Paper Accepted | April 27, 2025 |

    Our paper ‘Characterizing the Effects of Translation on Intertextuality using Multilingual Embedding Spaces’ was accepted at NAACL 2025.

  • Paper Accepted | April 27, 2025 |

    Our paper ‘Computational Discovery of Chiasmus in Ancient Religious Text’ was accepted at NAACL 2025.

  • New Resource Released | December 19, 2024 |

    I released an original language corpus of the Greek New Testament on the Huggingface Hub with word-level grammatical annotations, English glosses, and manuscript attestation. You can see it here

  • Paper Accepted | December 08, 2024 |

    Our paper ‘Your Large Language Models are Leaving Fingerprints’ was accepted at the ‘Detecting AI-Generated Content’ Workshop at COLING 2025.

  • Invited Talk | December 06, 2024, Uppsala, Sweden |

    ‘Exploring Narrative Typology with Deep Learning’ delivered at the World Philology Union. See Slides

  • Invited Talk | October 25, 2024, Thessaloniki, Greece |

    ‘Will AI Change the World For Good?’ delivered at the FEUER Academic Speakers’ Network.

  • Paper Presentation | August 15, 2024, Bangkok, Thailand |

    I presented our paper Detecting Narrative Patterns in Biblical Greek and Hebrew at the Machine Learning for Ancient Languages (ML4AL) Workshop at ACL 2024. See Poster

  • Paper Accepted | June 25, 2024 |

    Our paper Detecting Narrative Patterns in Biblical Greek and Hebrew was accepted at the Machine Learning for Ancient Languages (ML4AL) Workshop at ACL 2024.

  • Best PhD Research Presentation | May 04, 2024, Oxford, UK |

    My Work-in-Progress talk on ‘Poetic Translation with AI’ won ‘Best PhD Research Presentation’ at the 10th Annual Oxbridge Women in CS Conference. See Slides

  • Invited Talk | October 23, 2023, Cambridge, UK |

    ‘AI Innovation and the Limits of Humanity’ delivered as part of the Life in the Round speaker series at the historic Round Church in Cambridge. ~200 in attendance.