Charlie F. Welch

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Room 2.118

Friedrich-Hirzebruch-Allee 6

53115 Bonn Germany

I am currently a Junior Research Group Leader at the University of Bonn. I am collaborating with the CAISA lab led by Prof. Lucie Flek. I received my PhD at the University of Michigan, advised by Prof. Rada Mihalcea, where I worked with the LIT lab.

My research focuses on the frontiers of customizable language generation and models of perception. I am interested in how attributes of text, such as toxicity and empathy, interact and can be used for mutual improvement. I will be investigating how these techniques can be used to study stylistic attributes as well as populations. By better modeling both people and properties of language, I hope to both make language technology more useful and to better understand how diverse groups of people view the world. With a heightened understanding of who we are solving problems for, we can more sustainably train models, reducing environmental costs and supporting a more inclusive research community.

news

Mar 22, 2024 Happy to announce some recently accepted papers: (1) Archetypes and Entropy: Theory-Driven Extraction of Evidence for Suicide Risk at CLPsych, with our collaborators at Stony Brook University, (2) Appraisal Framework for Clinical Empathy: A Novel Application to Breaking Bad News Conversations to appear at LREC, led by Allie Lahnala, and (3) Corpus Considerations for Annotator Modeling and Scaling to appear at NAACL, led by Funke Sarumi and including the thesis work of Béla Neuendorf!
Oct 6, 2023 I will be recruiting PhD students at McMaster University to start in Fall 2024. The deadline to apply to McMaster University is March 31st 2024. Apply here for September and mention me in your application.
Aug 24, 2023 I have accepted a position at McMaster University and will be starting as an Assistant Professor in 2024!