Stephen Bothwell
Graduate Student
University of Notre Dame
Salve! My name is Stephen Bothwell, and I am a researcher whose interests are at the intersection of both the ancient and the modern. In particular, I study the application of techniques in natural language processing (NLP) to ancient languages. I am invested in unifying linguistic ideas and modern computational (e.g., neural) techniques.
Currently, I am a fifth-year graduate student in the NLP Group at the University of Notre Dame. I am advised by Dr. David Chiang, and I work on projects pertaining to linguistic attributes at a variety of granularities. One line of work concerns the derivation of phonological rules in historical linguistics, striving to add interpretability to derived systems of ancestor and descendant language forms through the determination of rules. Another line of work explores stylistics, attempting to pin down and capture the notion of rhetorical parallelism.
Aside from research, I also have served as a senior pedagogy fellow for the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship. I have taught about neural networks, aiming to improve AI literacy. Thus far, I have taught two workshops. The first is "Talking Neural Networks: A Beginner's Guide", which provides an introduction to the concept of neural networks and provides a guide to some essential machine learning jargon. The second is "Neural Networks for the Wordsmith: An Encounter in Python", which guides workshop participants through building a system in PyTorch to train recurrent neural networks for a classification task. I am currently working on building additional workshops for the Python programming language.
Education
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Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science and Engineering
University of Notre Dame
Ongoing (Projected Conclusion: Summer 2026) -
M.S., Computer Science and Engineering
University of Notre Dame
2025 -
B.A., Computer Science (Minor in Mathematics)
Xavier University
2019 -
Honors B.A., Classics & Philosophy (Minor in Philosophy)
Xavier University
2019
