Dr. Maria Santos
Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics in the Department of Computer Science at MIT. Research focuses on natural language processing, multilingual models, low-resource languages, computational morphology, and machine translation.
Associate Professor
MIT CSAIL
Assistant Professor
MIT CSAIL
Postdoctoral Researcher
Carnegie Mellon University
Ph.D. Computer Science
Stanford University - Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Morphologically Rich Languages
M.S. Computer Science
University of Sao Paulo
B.S. Computer Science
University of Sao Paulo (Summa Cum Laude)
## Selected Publications
**Santos, M., & Liu, W. (2024).** "Scaling Multilingual LLMs to 200 Languages with Minimal Supervision." ACL 2024. (Best Paper Award)
**Santos, M., Park, J., & Ahmed, K. (2023).** "MorphBERT: Morphology-Aware Pre-training for Agglutinative Languages." EMNLP 2023.
**Santos, M., & Chen, Y. (2022).** "Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer with Typological Features." NAACL 2022.
**Santos, M., et al. (2021).** "AfroNLP: A Benchmark for African Language Technologies." NeurIPS 2021 Datasets Track.
**Santos, M. (2020).** "Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation: A Survey." Computational Linguistics, 46(2), 301-350.
## Awards and Honors
• ACL Best Paper Award 2024 • NSF CAREER Award 2022 • MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 (2021) • Google Faculty Research Award 2020 • Stanford Best Dissertation Award 2015
## Teaching
**6.861 Natural Language Processing** (Fall 2023, 2022, 2021)
**6.864 Advanced NLP** (Spring 2024, 2023)
**6.S898 Deep Learning for NLP** (IAP 2023)
## PhD Students Advised
• Wei Liu (2024, now at Google DeepMind) • Jae Park (expected 2025) • Kwame Ahmed (expected 2026)
## Service
**Area Chair:** ACL 2024, EMNLP 2023, NAACL 2022
**Senior Program Committee:** AAAI 2024, IJCAI 2023
**Editorial Board:** Computational Linguistics journal (2022-present)
**Co-organizer:** Workshop on African NLP (AfricaNLP), 2021-2024