Ayal Klein

Hi, welcome to my homepage. My Portrait Picture

About

I am a post-doctoral researcher in Queen Mary University of London and Bar Ilan University, working on Natual Language Processing. I work with Prof. Maria Liakata and Prof. Dana Atzil-Slonim on employing advanced NLP methods in order to gain scientific insights in the domain of psychotherapy research. Our goal is to decipher the mental processes and dynamics underlying mental health and effective psychotherapy.

Previously, I completed my B.Sc. (2015) in Psychology and Philosophy at Bar Ilan University, and my M.Sc. (2018) and Ph.D. (2024) in Computer Science, in the Natural Language Processing Lab at Bar Ilan University under the supervision of Prof. Ido Dagan. My Ph.D was focused on Semantic Representations (see the QASem project).

Beyond that, my research interests are (very) broad, and include computational linguistics, semantics and meaning, cognitive psycholinguistics, and understanding NLP deep learning models. I’m also enthusiastic about cross-disciplanry collaborations of AI and Data-Science specialists with social sciences and humanities, aiming at revolutionzing the way we investigate, measure and confirm/disprove scientific research questions in the ``softer’’ sciences.

The QASem project

In my Ph.D, we have devised a natural way to break down the information conveyed by langauge, using question-answer pairs. Our semantic framework, termed QASem (QA-based Semantics), consists of several annotation ‘layers’ covering different types of textual information or semantic relations. Our tool takes in a sentences and outputs a set of QAs that correspond to the basic information units in the sentence. You can take a look at the QASem demo or install its latest version it in your python environment through pip install qasem_parser. See our repo for further details (or Paul’s repo for the latest, more performant version).

Publications

Zhang, Shiyue, David Wan, Arie Cattan, Ayal Klein, Ido Dagan, and Mohit Bansal. “QAPyramid: Fine-grained Evaluation of Content Selection for Text Summarization.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.07096. 2024.

Klein, Ayal, Jiayu Song, Jenny Chim, Liran Keren, Andreas Triantafyllopoulos, Björn Schuller, Maria Liakata, and Dana Atzil-Slonim. “Clinical Insights from Social Media: Assessing Summaries of Large Language Models and Humans.” OSF Preprints. November 4. doi:10.31219/osf.io/ehp97. 2024.

Triantafyllopoulos, Andreas, Yannik Terhorst, Iosif Tsangko, Florian B. Pokorny, Katrin D. Bartl-Pokorny, Lennart Seizer, Ayal Klein, Jenny Chim, Dana Atzil-Slonim, Maria Liakata, Markus Bühner, Johanna Löchner, and Björn Schuller. “Large language models for mental health.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.11880. 2024.

Roit, Paul, Aviv Slobodkin, Eran Hirsch, Arie Cattan, Ayal Klein, Valentina Pyatkin, and Ido Dagan. “Explicating the Implicit: Argument Detection Beyond Sentence Boundaries.” In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 16394–16409, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics. 2024.

Pesahov, Leon, Ayal Klein, and Ido Dagan. “QA-Adj: Adding Adjectives to QA-based Semantics.” In Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Designing Meaning Representations, pp. 74–88, Nancy, France. Association for Computational Linguistics. 2023.

Klein, Ayal, Eran Hirsch, Ron Eliav, Valentina Pyatkin, Avi Caciularu, and Ido Dagan. “QASem Parsing: Text-to-text Modeling of QA-based Semantics.” In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 7742–7756, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics. 2022.

Klein, Ayal, Oren Pereg, Daniel Korat, Vasudev Lal, Moshe Wasserblat, and Ido Dagan. “Opinion-based Relational Pivoting for Cross-domain Aspect Term Extraction.” In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis, pp. 104-112. 2022.

Weiss, Daniela Brook, Paul Roit, Ayal Klein, Ori Ernst, and Ido Dagan. “QA-Align: Representing Cross-Text Content Overlap by Aligning Question-Answer Propositions.” In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 9879-9894. 2021.

Klein, Ayal, Jonathan Mamou, Valentina Pyatkin, Daniela Stepanov, Hangfeng He, Dan Roth, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Ido Dagan. “QANom: Question-answer driven SRL for nominalizations.” In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pp. 3069-3083. 2020.

Pyatkin, Valentina, Ayal Klein, Reut Tsarfaty, and Ido Dagan. “QADiscourse-Discourse Relations as QA Pairs: Representation, Crowdsourcing and Baselines.” In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pp. 2804-2819. 2020.

Roit, Paul, Ayal Klein, Daniela Stepanov, Jonathan Mamou, Julian Michael, Gabriel Stanovsky, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Ido Dagan. “Controlled Crowdsourcing for High-Quality QA-SRL Annotation.” In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 7008-7013. 2020.

Teaching Experience

Lecturer for “Artificial Neural Networks” Course (27-436), Neuroscience Department, Bar Ilan University (2023-2024).
Teacher Assistant for “Object Oriented Programming” Course (89-111), Department of Computer Science, Bar Ilan University (2019-2020).
Teacher Assistant for “Discrete Mathematics 1” Course (89-195), Department of Computer Science, Bar Ilan University (2019).
Teacher Assistant for “Text Understanding” Course (89-565), Department of Computer Science, Bar Ilan University (2018).

Contact

Feel free to contact me.

Email: ayal dot s dot klein at gmail dot com

I’m also at LinkedIn.