Hello! 👋

My name is pronounced byʃ.’ɾa ‘maɾ.ʃan, and my pronouns are she/her.

I’m a fourth-year PhD student in Linguistics at Stanford University. I study meaning in humans and large language models: how they represent it, reason with it, and use it in communication.

My interests span formal semantics, linguistically informed NLP, experimental methods, and information-theoretic approaches to language. I combine formal theory with computational and experimental methods to explore what human and model behavior can tell us about language.

I am a member of the Social Interaction Lab and the Stanford NLP Group.

Büşra Marşan smiling, wearing round glasses and a blue sweater.

Read more about my research

One question driving my current research is how languages balance what they express explicitly with what listeners can recover from context. Focusing on person and pronoun systems, I explore how contextual information and the costs of misunderstanding might shape grammatical distinctions.

On the NLP side, I work on linguistically informed benchmarks, resource development, and model interpretability. I’m interested in moving beyond whether a model gets an answer right to understanding which linguistic information it uses and how it represents competing interpretations.

I currently work with Robert Hawkins. My first two qualifying papers were advised by Chris Potts: the first focused on linguistically grounded benchmarking for NLP systems, and the second developed a formal semantic account of Turkish evidentials.

I also have a growing interest in syntax, thanks in part to my friend and colleague Jasper Jian. Together, we’re investigating Turkish comitative coordination.

Before Stanford, I received my MA from Boğaziçi University in 2023, advised by Ümit Atlamaz and Ömer Demirok. As a member of TULAP/TABILAB, I helped develop Turkish PropBank, FrameNet, WordNet, and several Universal Dependencies treebanks.

You can find my publications and projects on my Publications and Projects pages, or visit my Google Scholar profile.

Outside of research, I love coding, cats, coffee, comic books, computer games, and a healthy dose of alliteration. In my free time, I play Hearthstone and indie games, spam my friends with niche memes, watch B-movies, and read fiction.