Hello! 👋
My name is pronounced as byʃ.’ɾa ‘maɾ.ʃan and my pronouns are she/her.

I am a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University, where I work at the intersection of formal semantics and natural language processing. I am broadly interested in meaning: how humans represent it, compute it, and reason with it, and how large language models approximate (or fail to approximate) those processes. I am a member of the Social Interaction Lab and the Stanford NLP Group.

My research combines formal semantic theory with computational methods. Much of my work focuses on linguistically informed benchmarking, resource generation, and model interpretability.
Recently, I have also become increasingly interested in syntax (thanks to my friend and colleague Jasper Jian). Check out our ongoing project on Turkish comitative coordination.

I am currently working with Robert Hawkins, focusing on on how large language models process and represent information.
My first two qualifying papers were advised by Chris Potts. My first QP focused on linguistically grounded benchmarking for NLP systems, and my second is a formal semantic investigation of Turkish evidentials.

I received my MA in 2023 from Boğaziçi University. My advisors were Dr. Ümit Atlamaz and Dr. Ömer Demirok. During my MA, I worked as a member of BOUN TULAP/TABILAB, and I was part of the team that created Turkish Propbank, Turkish FrameNet, and Turkish WordNet. I also participated in creation of several UD style treebanks in Turkish.

For a full list of my publications so far, you can check the Research page here or 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.