Research Area

I am a researcher working at the intersection of philosophy and natural language processing (NLP). My primary research area is the philosophical theory and computational implementation of argumentation and logical inference. In philosophy, I’m influenced by inferentialism and pragmatism. In NLP, most of my research involves large language models (LLMs). However, I hypothesize that LLMs, being world-class associators (very good system 1 thinkers, to borrow from Kahnemann), might not be ideally suited for logical reasoning, calling for a hybrid, neuro-symbolic approach, combining the strengths of LLMs (system 1) with rule-based methods (system 2). My secondary research area concerns the philosophical reflection about the kind of things that LLMs are, e.g., on whether they understand or speak language in the full sense of these terms.

Academic Career

I studied (in chronological order) mathematics at ETHZ, linguistics, philosophy, and Multi-Lingual Text Analysis at UZH, where I graduated with an MA in Philosophy and Multi-Lingual Text Analysis. My PhD thesis (summa cum laude, also at UZH) focused on the philosophy of W.V.O. Quine. After that, I spent several years working in university management and as a part-time postdoc in Data Science and NLP at the University of St.Gallen. Now I am honored to be PI at project AI-R both at the DSI and at the Department of Computational Linguistics. Throughout my academic career, I have successfully acquired competitive third-party funding from various institutions, including the SNSF.
I have been teaching on a university level since 2013, predominantly in logics and theoretical philosophy as well as, together with Peter Hongler, in legal methodology, at UZH and the University of St.Gallen (HSG).