Hope McGovern


2024

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Detecting Narrative Patterns in Biblical Hebrew and Greek
Hope McGovern | Hale Sirin | Tom Lippincott | Andrew Caines
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Machine Learning for Ancient Languages (ML4AL 2024)

We present a novel approach to extracting recurring narrative patterns, or type-scenes, in Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Greek with an information retrieval network. We use cross-references to train an encoder model to create similar representations for verses linked by a cross-reference. We then query our trained model with phrases informed by humanities scholarship and designed to elicit particular kinds of narrative scenes. Our models can surface relevant instances in the top-10 ranked candidates in many cases.Through manual error analysis and discussion, we address the limitations and challenges inherent in our approach. Our findings contribute to the field of Biblical scholarship by offering a new perspective on narrative analysis within ancient texts, and to computational modeling of narrative with a genre-agnostic approach for pattern-finding in long, literary texts.

2023

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CLIMB – Curriculum Learning for Infant-inspired Model Building
Richard Diehl Martinez | Hope McGovern | Zebulon Goriely | Christopher Davis | Andrew Caines | Paula Buttery | Lisa Beinborn
Proceedings of the BabyLM Challenge at the 27th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning