Overview
Yves Peirsman is co-founder and CTO of Deontic, a company he co-founded in November 2022. He is based in Leuven. Since October 2024 he has written for Standaard Uitgeverij, and since April 2023 he has spoken on creative writing and AI for Creatief Schrijven vzw. Between October 2020 and September 2024 he wrote for Uitgeverij Houtekiet.
He founded NLP Town in May 2014 and worked there as a natural language processing expert until December 2022. Before that he was a content architect at Wolters Kluwer Belgium from 2012 to 2014 and a research engineer at Textkernel from 2011 to 2012.
Peirsman completed a PhD in computational linguistics at KU Leuven between 2006 and 2010, having been a postgraduate research student there the year before, and spent part of 2009 as a visiting PhD student at the University of Stuttgart. He was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University from October 2010 to September 2011. He holds an MSc in speech and language processing from the University of Edinburgh and an MA in linguistics from KU Leuven, and attended Broederschool Sint-Niklaas.
Career history
In the news
- Great to welcome the NLP Meetup community to our office last night! 🧠 Thanks to Sofie Van Landeghem, Younes Baghor and our own François Remy for the talks, to Yves Peirsman for organising, and to Mathias Colpaert for hosting. And to everyone who came by: see you at the next one.
- Yesterday we had another great edition of the Belgium NLP Meetup in Ghent, with three speakers that offered very different perspectives on building AI systems: François Remy explained how Trendtracker trained its own multilingual relationship extraction model to power its knowledge graph. He also walked us through the key decisions behind the training data and model architectures. Sofie Van Landeghem introduced nanochat, Andrej Karpathy's fully open-source LLM implementation, which she maintains. She also showed how autoresearch
- Happy to have hosted the NLP meetup yesterday at Trendtracker! Very interesting (and dangerous) talks! Sofie Van Landeghem on recursive self-improving LLM engineering (help, the end is near) and the open source work at Sevren, a fresh 🇪🇺 lab for AI. Younes Baghor on adapting your software engineering process and tools for the modern era. The problems mentioned hit close to home! François Remy presenting our own relationship extraction models and the knowledge graphs we build on top. What a legend! Looking forward to the next
- With two and a half weeks to go, the program of the 31st Belgium NLP Meetup is now complete. Here are the three presentations: 🧠 François Remy will explain how Trendtracker trained its own multilingual relationship extraction model to power its knowledge graph, which jointly identifies entities and links them by relationship type. He'll discuss why they chose a bi-affine architecture, and how scale, cost, and reproducibility shaped the design. He'll also show how the extracted relationships can be leveraged to help with entity
- Meet Deontic at DSC 2026 Europe XR in Antibes. From 16 to 18 September, our CTO Yves Peirsman will be on site at the 2026 Driving Simulation Association Conference, exhibiting and presenting on how generative AI can turn requirements and ODDs into standards-compliant simulation scenarios. ADAS and AD validation is still too slow: engineers spend weeks hand-crafting scenarios for every new geography and operational design domain, while legislation and standards keep moving. At DSC we’ll show how Deontic closes that gap: -
- It's back to school week, and that means meetups, too, spring back to life. With agents that escape their sandboxes, a blistering pace of model releases, and a couple of landmark IPOs looming, NLP and AI enthusiasts certainly have enough to talk about. The next Belgium NLP Meetup will take place on Thursday October 8th in the offices of Trendtracker in Ghent. We'll open the doors at 7pm for pizza, have three interesting talks between 7.30pm and 9pm, and after that there's more time for networking and drinks. One talk has already
- Yesterday I visited the HERE Technologies tech day in Paris to demonstrate how Here and Deontic can help engineers create simulation scenarios for their vehicles in real-world locations: Here provides the location data, while Deontic generates the driving scenarios. It was great to see so much enthusiasm about our solution, and I'm looking forward to collaborating further with the teams at Here.
Related profiles
This page shows public professional information only, each fact cited. Is this you? send a correction, or ask for removal within 24 hours, no questions asked.