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

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!
Aug 24, 2023 Our paper Challenges of GPT-3-based Conversational Agents for Healthcare was accepted to RANLP and our paper Style Locality for Controllable Generation with kNN Language Models was accepted to the Taming Large Language Models Workshop at SIGDIAL/INLG.
Mar 31, 2023 Our follow-up paper on EI was accepted to JMIR. Expressive Interviewing Agents to Support Health-Related Behavior Change: A Study of COVID-19 Behaviors.