Charlie F. Welch

I am an Assistant Professor at McMaster University. In the past, I was a Junior Research Group Leader collaborating with the CAISA lab led by Prof. Lucie Flek at the University of Bonn. 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.