about

Gilles Jacobs ▪ engineer

Gilles Jacobs pairs a PhD in NLP with production AI engineering: open benchmarks, tested models, and clear ownership of delivery.

I'm Gilles Jacobs, an engineer, researcher, and explorer of ideas. With a PhD in natural language processing, I turn language research into working AI systems. Beyond software, I build with CAD and 3D printing. This is my workshop and field notebook: projects, discoveries, and new horizons.

Language, engineering, and curiosity

I'm Gilles Jacobs, an engineer with a PhD in natural language processing and more than a decade of experience across AI research and commercial software. I work on language models, retrieval, structured extraction, evaluation, and the systems that make them useful.

Through , my consulting practice, I connect research with hands-on delivery. My work spans financial services, insurance, healthcare, life sciences, and customer service. This site is also a place for the questions and projects I follow outside client work.

Explore my projects

Research and practice

My doctoral research at Ghent University studied financial events and sentiment in economic news. SENTiVENT continues as an open dataset and evaluation toolkit, with reproducible splits, strict and relaxed scoring, and regression tests.

I studied artificial intelligence and computational linguistics at KU Leuven, graduating magna cum laude in both programmes. Research and production engineering inform each other: ask a clear question, test the assumptions, and make the evidence inspectable.

Away from the screen

My interests include CAD and 3D printing, blockchain smart contracts, and swimming. I enjoy understanding how things fit together, whether that means a physical design, a piece of software, or an idea worth testing.

I've also been involved in event organisation and funding at Hackerspace.gent, represented artificial intelligence students, and taught English at language camps. Building and learning are often better with other people.

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Research & press

My SENTiVENT doctoral research explored events and implicit sentiment in economic news. The original Dutch press material below describes that research; my current project page covers the dataset and its independent follow-up.

Met SENTiVENT creëerde taaltechnoloog Gilles Jacobs (UGent) een handige analysetool voor de financiële wereld. Met die tool kunnen bedrijven, beursanalisten, marktonderzoekers, financieel journalisten en economen volledig geautomatiseerd nagaan welk sentiment, positief dan wel negatief, economische nieuwsberichten oproepen. Dat is belangrijk omdat financiële markten en investeerders bijzonder gevoelig blijken voor ‘goed’ of ‘slecht’ businessnieuws.

Materiaal:

Beeld:

SENTiVENT research logo.
SENTiVENT research logo.