Ayal Klein

Hi, welcome to my homepage. My Portrait Picture

About

I am a Ph.D researcher in Computer Science in the Natural Language Processing Lab at Bar Ilan University under the supervision of Prof. Ido Dagan. Most of my research so far is focused on Semantic Representations. Other that that, my research interests are broad and include computational linguistics, semantics and meaning, cognitive psycholinguistics and applied deep learning for NLP.

I completed my B.Sc. (2015) in Psychology and Philosophy and my M.Sc. (2018) in Computer Science at Bar Ilan University.

The QASem project

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 it in your python environment through pip install qasem. See our repo for further details.

Publications

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

This year (2023) I will be lecturing the “Artificial Neural Networks” course at the neuroscience department, Bar Ilan University.

Previously, I had a great time teaching in the following courses:

Teacher Assistant for “Object Oriented Programming” Course (89-111), Bar Ilan University (2019-2020).
Teacher Assistant for “Discrete Mathematics 1” Course (89-195), Bar Ilan University (2019).
Teacher Assistant for “Text Understanding” Course (89-565), 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.