Photo of Rebecca Hicke

I am on the job market for tenure-track faculty positions beginning in 2027.

I am a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Cornell University, where I am advised by David Mimno as part of the C2L Lab. I will graduate in May 2027. My research is in applied artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP), motivated by problems from computational humanities. I contribute to both technical and literary domains: I use challenging questions about narratives to help define the boundaries of what large language models (LLMs) can do and to create datasets and methods for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. I am particularly interested in using domain expertise to inform computational approaches to scaling narrative research. I employ methods ranging from statistical modeling and human annotation to linear probes and cutting-edge applications of LLMs. My work has been published in core NLP venues (EMNLP, COLM) and domain-specific conferences and workshops (e.g., the Conference on Computational Humanities Research [CHR]). I am also committed to teaching students in CS and data science, with a particular interest in introductory classes.

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. During the summer of 2025, I was a research intern in the AIIL Group at Microsoft, supervised by Kiran Tomlinson. Finally, in the summer of 2026, I was the instructor of record for INFO 1100: Introduction to Programming, which I re-designed and wrote the materials for from scratch.

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. 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
📝   The work I did at Microsoft Research on the trajectories of LLM users was accepted at the main EMNLP conference.
📝   Our work on the uniformity and linearity of novel summaries is available as a pre-print.
🍎   I spent the summer of 2026 as lead instructor for INFO 1100: Introduction to Programming at Cornell.
📝   Our paper on benchmarks for long-context understanding was accepted at LaTeCH-CLfL 2026.
📝   Two papers on focalization analysis at scale and automated narrative analysis of Christian Fiction were accepted at CHR 2025.
📝   Our paper on sensory language usage in LLMs was accepted at COLM 2025.
🌎   I spent the summer of 2025 as a Research Intern for the AIIL group at Microsoft Research!