Photo of Rebecca Hicke

I am a third-year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Cornell University, where I am advised by David Mimno as part of the C2L Lab. My research interests lie in computational humanities research, natural language processing, and cultural analytics. Specifically, I explore how large language models (LLMs) can be use for complex textual, particularly literary, analysis tasks. My interest is both in developing research methods and tools for humanities scholars and using literary texts as challenging test cases with which to explore the real-world capabilities of LLMs. In the summer of 2024 I worked as a research assistant for Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan at the Center for Humanities Computing at Aarhus University.

In 2022, I graduated from Carleton College with a Bachelors of Arts in Computer Science and English and a minor in Digital Arts and Humanities. During this time I was advised by Eric Alexander and George Shuffelton. I also participated in the SUPERB REU at UC Berkeley in the summer of 2021, where I was advised by Sarah Chasins and Aditya Parameswaran.

Please feel free to reach out to me by email if you have any questions!


News
📝   A new paper on understanding literary style with LLMs was accepted to the Expanding the Toolkit: Large Language Models in Humanities Research special issue of the CHR journal.
📝   A new paper introducing a corpus of ~70,000 literary social networks was accepted at NLP4DH 2025.
🌎   I will spend the summer of 2025 working as a PhD intern for the AIIL group at Microsoft Research!
🏆   Our paper on computationally identifying conceptual metaphors was shortlisted for the Best Short Paper Award at CHR 2024
📣   I presented our paper on computationally identifying conceptual metaphors at CHR 2024 in Aarhus
🌎   I spent the summer at the Center for Humanities Computing at Aarhus University as a Visiting PhD Student