I am an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I work mainly in Formal Semantics, Pragmatics, Philosophy of Language, Cognitive Science and AI/Machine Learning. Most of my research explores the ways in which our general logical and reasoning capacities enter into various aspects of our linguistic competence. I’ve also worked on related topics in the foundations of Cognitive Science and AI, including the structure of concepts and their relation to categorization, compositionality and decision-making.
More recently, my focus has shifted to various topics in alignment and finetuning of AI models, focusing on improving our control and understanding of reasoning and decision-making in AI models, especially in ethical and scientific domains.
Currently, I’m working on training regimes—inspired by certain insights in the philosophy of science—that nudge AI models to acquire stronger dispositions to generate abstract, human-interpretable and reliable explanations. I’m also working on different ways of tweaking automated techniques for value alignment to steer AI’s decision-making so as to systematically follow the principles of specific ethical systems.
gdelpinal@umass.edu
