Marie Tano

Marie Tano (she/her) is a PhD Student in Linguistics. Her areas of interest include psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and Natural Language Processing (NLP)/computational linguistics. She holds a BA in Cognitive Science from Pomona College. As a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, the bulk of her research experiences focused on how people's ethnoracial identities correlate to their linguistic behavior (and vise-versa). Her projects have investigated the social experiences of African-American English (AAE) speakers from a variety of different vantage points such as their racialization and characterization in digital spaces, discrimination in educational settings, and linguistic behavior in international/diasporic settings. 

Her current project reflects her growing interest in bias/ethics in technology, which compares human interpretations of blame and responsibility within police headlines, to those of Large Language Models (LLMs). In her future work, Marie hopes to combine her sociophonetic background with her passion for NLP, through assessing LLMs' limited familiarity with Black language varieties. On campus, Marie is involved with the Black Community Services Center as a Graduate Scholar-in-Residence. In addition to the RAISE fellowship, Marie's work is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program, and the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education Fellowship.