Stephen Bothwell
Ph.D. Candidate
University of Notre Dame
Notice: I am currently looking into positions after my Ph.D.. I am primarily interested in postdocs and/or positions in university library spaces. If you have an opportunity that you'd like to discuss with me, please feel free to reach out to me!
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 sixth-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 language at various granularities. One line of work concerns the derivation of sound laws 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 computationally detect and analyze rhetorical devices like rhythm and parallelism.
Aside from research, I also have served as a senior pedagogy fellow for the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship. Through the NFCDS, I have aided AI literacy through teaching both about the fundamentals of neural networks as well as about more complex topics (e.g., using specific architectures in PyTorch). Please see the "Teaching" tab for more details on the workshops I produced through the NFCDS' fellowship program.
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
Selected Publications
- S. Bothwell, K. Stephan, H. Müller, and D. Chiang, August 29th, 2025, "Notre Dame Digitized Latin Collection (ND-DLC)," distributed by Zenodo, Available: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16996067.
- S. Bothwell, B. DuSell, D. Chiang, and B. Krostenko. "PILA: A Historical-Linguistic Dataset of Proto-Italic and Latin." Proc. LREC-COLING, May 2024. https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1116.
- S. Bothwell and D. Chiang. pyrallelism. GitHub (v1.1.1). Available: https://github.com/Mythologos/pyrallelism. Accessed: October 5, 2025.
- S. Bothwell, J. DeBenedetto, T. Crnkovich, H. Müller, and D. Chiang. "Introducing Rhetorical Parallelism Detection: A New Task with Datasets, Metrics, and Baselines." Proc. EMNLP, December 2023. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.305.
