Ayah ZiriklyView profile
Researcher
Ayah Zirikly is an Assistant Research Scientist at the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) at Johns Hopkins University, specializing in Natural Language Processing applications for mental health and clinical informatics. Her work bridges computational linguistics with real-world healthcare challenges, particularly in suicide risk assessment and bias detection in medical documentation. Research Focus: Dr. Zirikly pioneers NLP solutions for mental health informatics, with landmark contributions including the UMD Reddit Suicidality Dataset for suicide risk assessment and NLP tools for Social Security Administration disability eligibility processes. Her expertise spans Arabic NLP (co-developer of MADAMIRA toolkit), transfer learning for low-resource settings, and analysis of stigmatizing language in clinical records. Recent work investigates social determinants of health through electronic health record analysis and develops frameworks for detecting AI dataset bias. Publication Trends: 2023-2025 publications reveal three dominant threads: (1) Suicide prevention via social media analysis and data warehouse modeling, (2) Linguistic bias detection in medical records with focus on race/gender disparities, and (3) Synthetic data generation for clinical communication. Her leadership in CLPsych workshops establishes her as a key contributor to clinical NLP benchmarking. Professional Background: Holds a PhD in Computer Science from George Washington University (Mona Diab's NLP lab) and completed postdoctoral training at the National Institutes of Health. Current research extends her NIH work on mobility/mental health status extraction for disability determination while addressing critical gaps in health equity through computational methods.








