Dr. Mara
Osei.
Three-time recipient of the Provost's Teaching Excellence Award
47
Publications
1,284
Citations
23
Keynote Talks
12
Years Teaching
On the Record.
When Machines Read Between the Lines
ACL Annual Conference · Vienna, Austria
An examination of pragmatic inference in large language models — what they understand, what they simulate, and the gap that remains.
When Machines Read Between the Lines
ACL Annual Conference
The Grammar of Silence
Cognitive Science Society · Rotterdam, Netherlands
How computational models of language systematically misrepresent the communicative weight of what is left unsaid.
The Grammar of Silence
Cognitive Science Society
Language Models as Cultural Mirrors
NeurIPS Workshop on Bias · Vancouver, Canada
Tracing how training corpora encode cultural assumptions and what that means for deployment in multilingual contexts.
Language Models as Cultural Mirrors
NeurIPS Workshop on Bias
Teaching Machines to Disagree
EMNLP Main Conference · Singapore
A framework for modeling productive disagreement in dialogue systems — moving beyond consensus-seeking architectures.
Teaching Machines to Disagree
EMNLP Main Conference
Syntax, Semantics, and the Limits of Scale
Linguistics Society of America · Denver, CO
Why scaling laws fail to predict linguistic competence and what a more nuanced theory of language acquisition demands.
Syntax, Semantics, and the Limits of Scale
Linguistics Society of America
Prosody in the Age of Text
International Phonetics Association · Prague, Czech Republic
Exploring how written language encodes prosodic information and what NLP systems lose by ignoring it.
Prosody in the Age of Text
International Phonetics Association
In Print.
47 peer-reviewed articles across computational linguistics, cognitive science, and AI. Full bibliography available on Google Scholar.
Computational Linguistics · 2024
Pragmatic Inference in Transformer Architectures: A Gricean Analysis
Osei, M., Nakamura, T., & Ferreira, C.
DOI: 10.1162/coli_a_00482
Language · 2024
Silence as Signal: Zero-Anaphora in Low-Resource Languages
Osei, M. & Adeyemi, F.
DOI: 10.1353/lan.2024.a924318
Transactions of the ACL · 2023
Cultural Bias in Multilingual BERT: A Corpus Analysis
Osei, M., Zhao, L., & Patel, R.
DOI: 10.1162/tacl_a_00568
Journal of Phonetics · 2023
Prosodic Encoding in Encoder-Decoder Models
Osei, M. & Lindqvist, A.
DOI: 10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101267
Artificial Intelligence · 2022
Productive Disagreement in Dialogue Systems
Osei, M., Chen, W., & Morales, E.
DOI: 10.1016/j.artint.2022.103791
Cognitive Science · 2022
Scaling Laws and Linguistic Competence: A Critical Review
Osei, M.
DOI: 10.1111/cogs.13185Student Voices.
“The way she explains pragmatic inference — using everyday conversations as data — made me realize I had been doing linguistics without knowing it my whole life.”
Anonymous Student · LING 302: Language & Cognition
Fall 2024
“I came in skeptical that a computational linguistics course could change how I think. By week three, I was applying Gricean maxims to my own writing. That transfer is rare.”
Anonymous Student · LING 415: Computational Methods
Spring 2024
“Her feedback on my thesis draft was the most substantive I have received in four years. She read every word and responded to the argument, not just the grammar.”
Anonymous Student · Graduate Seminar: NLP Theory
Fall 2023
“The silence exercise on day one — where she asked us to analyze what was communicated by what was not said — is something I still think about.”
Anonymous Student · LING 201: Introduction to Linguistics
Spring 2023
Courses Designed & Taught
LING 201 · Undergrad
Introduction to Linguistics
84
students
LING 302 · Undergrad
Language & Cognition
36
students
LING 415 · Upper Division
Computational Methods in Linguistics
24
students
LING 601 · Graduate
NLP Theory: Advanced Seminar
12
students
LING 620 · Graduate
Proseminar: Research Methods
8
students
Average Teaching Evaluation Score
4.91 / 5.0
Across 847 individual student evaluations · 2018–2026
The Record.
A decade of competitive funding, editorial service, and institutional recognition — the infrastructure behind the scholarship.
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship
Language, Power & Technology · 2023–2025
Two-year residential fellowship supporting research into linguistic bias in AI systems deployed in under-resourced language communities.
Total Grant Funding
$1.4M
across 6 funded projects
Provost's Teaching Excellence Award
2020, 2022, 2024
Awarded three times — the only faculty member to receive this distinction in consecutive review cycles.
NSF CAREER Award
Award #2145892 · $512,000
Five-year grant: "Computational Models of Pragmatic Competence in Low-Resource Languages."
PhD Students Supervised
8
3 graduated, 5 current
Academic Service
Program Committees & Editorial Boards
Area Chair, ACL 2024 & 2025 · Editorial Board, Computational Linguistics · Review Committee, NSF Linguistics · Faculty Senate, Harwick University (2022–present)
Fulbright Senior Scholar
University of Lagos · 2019
Research collaboration on Yoruba syntax and computational modeling of tonal languages.