Cheerful, friendly, warm, intelligent and dynamic. That’s how Thierry was like. Shocking, unexpected, terrible, devastating and painful. That’s how his loss has been.
In a world ruled by deadlines, bureaucracy and impossible requirements, Thierry was a breath of fresh air. His way of seeing life, in a calm and relaxed way, enjoying every minute, made him an incredible person, who was impossible not to love.
He was also a peculiar professional, as a philosopher working in the computer science field, his way of solving problems was both surprising and effective. Thierry enjoyed his work so much that it was almost impossible to find him at home. He spent his life traveling from conference to conference, if possible by train, all around the globe. Thierry used to say that trains were a very nice office to work from while watching the landscape passing by.
He was a pillar of the Linguistic Linked Data community, both at the scientific and human level. His contributions to the growth of Linguistic Linked Data as a discipline cannot be overestimated. His work, especially his recent contributions to the representation of sign language data as Linked Data, was pioneering and of the highest quality.
Thierry was restless in his promotion of the field and was key to many of the different initiatives which have led to its growth over the last few years; in this he will be simply irreplaceable. This is not to sell him short on his other scientific achievements in so many different fields of computational linguistics or, more broadly, his importance for promoting language resources and technologies at an European and international level. His CV is truly intimidating, even though he was the very opposite on a personal level.
Thierry was renowned for his friendliness and for being extremely generous with his time. Younger colleagues, particularly, could always count on Thierry to put them at ease and bring out the best in them, as his numerous collaborations will easily attest. Outside of the professional field, Thierry was also an inexhaustible source of knowledge of both music and cinema, and he used to share his favourite artists with his colleagues, such as the composer Wim Mertens or the filmmaker Federico Fellini. To say that Thierry was an exceptional human being, is an understatement.
The outpourings of grief at his passing have demonstrated that as a person he was universally beloved and well considered. It is difficult, deeply painful even, to contemplate future conferences and events without the presence of Thierry, to think that we won’t see his face light up in warmth and genuine pleasure at seeing us again, but he would undoubtedly have wanted us to make the effort, as well as to raise a glass or two in his memory. To quote an old Irish saying, we shall not see his like again.
When I heard about his loss some weeks ago, I couldn’t believe it. And I still can’t. Just a few days before, we had met in the datathon in Luznica. What good moments we shared there, like every time we met! Imposible to forget his contagious smile. I knew Thierry since 2010 when the Monnet project started. Since then, we have been working very closely in several projects and initiatives (Ontolex, Prêt-à-LLOD, NexusLinguarum, …). He was an enthusiastic Ontolex “evangelist” and, without any doubt, our linguistic linked data community owes to him a lot. But, above everything, Thierry was a friend, an extremely kind and warmhearted person, teaching us not only scientific excellence but a positive attitude in life. We will all miss our irreplaceable Thierry very much. Rest in peace.
Close, affable person. I did not deal with him for a long time, but it was enough to have a good memory of him. I am sorry for his passing. Descanse en paz.
Thierry Declerck was an unexpected discovery. When in 2019 I attended the LLOD Datathon in Dagstuhl, I didn’t know that I would leave there with a true friend. There, we spent one night awake, together with other participants, talking about music, theater and life concerns… With Thierry you could talk about anything. In 2021, I spent three months in Saarbrücken to work with him. There, we found out that our birthdays were one day apart, and the next two birthdays he came to visit me and celebrate together. This year, and the following, I’ll miss his company. My friends and family will also notice his absence. Once you meet Thierry, he becomes a person impossible to forget. I am grateful to have found such a rare, unique and pure specimen like him.
You will always be in my memory, Thierry.
Thierry was in charge of the content of this web site and we used to interact related to technical issues with it. He was a close and warm person, always with a smile and a positive attitude with anything.
He used to comunicate with me in Spanish in it’s emails, and you could feel this positive attitude in every talk 🙂
RIP
Thierry was a great researcher and a great friend! A person to work with very seriously and a person to laugh with at a coffee break, lunch or dinner at some event… A person easy to speak to. Thierry loved Bulgaria – he never missed any of our RANLP conference series. He also worked a lot, had interesting ideas, travelled a lot, knew many people, and everybody liked him. Will be greatly missed!!!
I can’t express with words how deeply I was shocked by his passing. I didn’t know him for a long time and I only coincided with him in 3 scientifc events but, throughout my career, I’ve met many interesting and good people and he surely was among the top ranked.
I was a fresh PhD student when I met Thierry for the first time.
When you are out of your water, facing a new community and without any background and connections in the area, it helps a lot when you meet such a warm hearted, positive, welcoming person, always with a smile ready for you and with a contagious curiosity about everything, be it our research or any interesting thing in life.
20 years have passed, we have crossed our paths many times, and he was always the same humble, genuinely beautiful person I met the first time.
I’m deeply saddened by his early passing, but I will always remember his smiling face as an icon of who he was, and I hope I can pass to others his positive message the same way he used to.
The news of Thierry’s passing came unexpectedly: He was always incredibly full of life, which would give me the feeling he could keep going forever. Suffice it to say, his passing has been difficult to wrap my head around. I am grateful for having known him — his friendliness, energy, and his passion for his projects. Rust in vrede, Thierry.
Our Lithuanian team will always remember Thierry as an incredibly warm, empathic, and supportive person. Whenever we shared our plans and concerns, he always responded and searched for possibilities to help and contribute. When Thierry found out that we were interested in linguistic annotation of Lithuanian texts, he came to Vilnius and lectured our students on the annotation of fairy-tales. When we asked for consultation on linking Lithuanian terminology, Thierry immediately started planning how he could assist us in this endeavour. Whenever we addressed him in emails, he responded with recommendations. We will also always remember our conversations with Thierry at conference events. His attentiveness and consideration embraced every person nearby and created a warm atmosphere in which everyone felt welcomed. We are very grateful, dear Thierry, for your incredible friendliness, and we will always appreciate it. Rest in peace, dear Thierry.
I could not believe this.
I remember the long discussions with Thierry and the group of colleagues during the LMF design and the data catagory registry filling. I’ll miss him.
I have been deeply sad about the sudden death of Thierry. The best way for me to characterize him is as a true philantropist. He has given so much, on a personal and professional level, to every single person he had a relationship with. Research-wise he has given so much to all of us, sharing his ideas openly, giving all of us encouraging feedback. I have always admired his positive and constructive attitude towards the ideas of others, taking them up and making them flourish in.a passionate and persistant way. There are very strong “egos” in science. He was the contrary, humble and willing to take up any good idea of others and contributing to it as it would have been his own. I personally owe him a lot professionally. The whole community does indeed, as we witness from all the voices speaking out after has death.
On a personal level, I have rarely met a person so friendly, full of warmth and empathy for others. He was able to relate on a very personal and intimate level with all of us, showing appreciation and respect for everyone. He thus had many true friends scattered all around the world.
If you would see a person alone somewhere at a conference, a newcomer, not integrated yet into the community or larger group of people knowing each other, Thierry would be the first one to relate and socialize with that person. He was a true embassador in every respect; his charisma, opennes and friendliness will be missed. I hope a little bit of Thierry will continue to live in every single one of us, as this will make the world a little bit better.
Rest in peace, dear Thierry.
On June 28th I received the grief-stricken news of Thierry’s passing. It was tough to believe. The news spread very quickly and everyone agreed on the great loss that it entailed for the scientific community.
I met Thierry for the first time in 2008 when visiting DFKI in Saarbrucken as part of my PhD program. He “literally” opened the doors of his house for me. I could stay in his apartment until I found a place to stay for the remaining 4 months. What was he asking in exchange? Absolutely nothing. Just that I would cook a “tortilla de patatas” anytime…That is how he was, both professionally and personally: an extremely generous person.
It was always an absolute pleasure to work with him and spend time together. He was a very enthusiastic person that would never say “no” to a project, paper, or endeavor of any type. He would always listen to new ideas, evaluate them, and give valuable advice. His vast knowledge of the area would make him the perfect candidate to discuss topics and work with. I am very thankful that I had the opportunity to be involved with him in many projects over the years and become friends. He will be missed at any venue and in any project.
In loving memory.
I first met Thierry in 2004, when we got both engaged in the Program Committee of a workshop on Knowledge Discovery and Ontologies at ECML/PKDD – symptomatically for him even then, he was apparently reaching out from his common, “comfort zone”, research field to a novel one. And then, more intimately, in the FP6 K-Space project. There he, among other, strongly supported (together with Paul Buitelaar), both scientifically and personally, my PhD student during his internship at DFKI. At that time we Czechs were newcomers in the EU in general, and for my team it was one of the first EU projects… but he treated us entirely as equals. And then we met on a number of other occasions, and his warmheartedness and spontaneity was always astonishing – just as other testimonies declare. It is still very tough to get used to the idea of not seeing him here anymore. I would really like to keep traces of his approach to life and work in myself, for the rest of my time.
Thierry has been a friend for many years.
I remember a meeting at DFKI in 2005 with PhD students from Stockholm. Thierry and his colleagues impressed us with projects and progress. But most important they made us feel welcome and took their time to join us for dinner and a glass of wine.
I remember a student excursion to Saarbrücken around 2010 where Thierry navigated our bus to the DFKI and organised a great program of talks and interviews for a load of Uni Zurich students.
I remember Thierry and another friend who had a meeting on Lake Geneva and volunteered to transport Swiss Alpine Club books from Lausanne to Zurich that we wanted for digitisation. It turned out that the books filled the complete trunk of the car. Thierry remarked with a smile that he made a “heavy” contribution to our Alpine corpus project.
I remember a Dagstuhl seminar where Thierry would come every so often: “Come on. Let’s play some ping pong.” He was a good player.
I remember Thierry during the pandemic years when we met repeatedly to form an Austrian-German-Switzerland consortium to work on machine translation for German varieties. The project was Thierry’s idea, and I regret that it did not take off.
I remember Thierry at last year’s LREC in Marseille. We stood on the terrace and gazed over the harbour and the sea. We talked about life and good science and amazing technology and our many years in the field and the years to come…
I miss Thierry.
I had the privilege of meeting Thierry in Skopje, where we invaluable working time together as part of the Nexus Linguarum workshop. From the moment we met, it was clear that Thierry was not only an expert in his field, but also a warm and generous soul.
Thierry’s passion for his work was infectious, and he approached every task with unwavering enthusiasm. He had a remarkable ability to share his extensive knowledge and expertise with others, making complex concepts accessible and fostering a spirit of collaboration. Our time together in Skopje was marked by his willingness to exchange ideas, explore new approaches, and work towards common goals.
Beyond his professional accomplishments, Thierry’s kindness and genuine interest in people left a lasting impression on everyone he met. He had a way of making those around him feel valued and appreciated. His warmth and openness created an environment where ideas could flourish, and friendships could grow.
While Thierry may no longer be with us, his legacy lives on in the knowledge he shared and the connections he forged. We remember him not only as a dedicated expert but as a wonderful human being who enriched our lives with his presence.
Thierry will be deeply missed, but his impact on our lives will be felt forever.
With a heavy heart and a profound sense of loss, I write these words for my dear Thierry. He was an extraordinary scholar, but even more importantly, a truly incredible human being — a genuine old soul who saw people for who they truly were. Thierry possessed a rare combination of intellect and empathy. He was a person who looked beyond the surface, beyond titles and accolades. He had an innate talent for connecting with people on a profound level, and for understanding their hopes, fears, and dreams. In his presence, everyone felt truly seen and heard. Last year, I had the privilege of spending much time with Thierry. I, for one, will forever be grateful for those moments and for the chance to tell him just how wonderful, thoughtful, helpful, and special he was. Although he is no longer with us, his memory will continue to inspire us to be better humans. Rest in peace, dear Thierry. You will be dearly missed, but your memory will live on in our hearts.
I can’t forget the smile of Thierry. And I can’t think of an LREC edition without Thierry.
He was one of the most passionate scholars I have ever met; and he was literally EVERYWHERE. That day, in Brno, I had told him “Thierry, you are also here! So good to see you again”.
We all will miss him so much, both as a researcher and as a wonderful human being.
It’s been a while, but I’m still struggling to believe it. I met Thierry about 15 years ago, so. I knew him from the language resource literature before, so I was really a bit flattered to finally meet him in person. Still, up to this point, I had been more active in other circles, and this was just on the way to attend my first LREC. After a night-trip from Berlin, my wife and me had been waiting for some time at Frankfurt-Hahn, a very small and very remote German airport, to catch an early flight to Marrakech. At some point, we spotted Thierry and a group of fellow NLP students and scholars, and we joined the group. We did a little bit of small-talk back then, only, and I guess I him told what I told everyone on that trip: That XML technologies were reaching limits in their semantic expressivity because they lack a natural way of representing negation and disjunction, and that graph technologies and OWL reasoning would be necessary for certain set of problems in NLP … at least for the small use case I was looking into, annotation mapping. It’s not that I was obsessed with the idea, but this would just be the motivation for the paper I was about to present.
I didn’t expect much to follow from this conversation. I still believe the impulse was right, though. But Thierry came back to me during the conference and we had a long discussion on advantages and limitations of RDF in comparison to XML technologies. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he’s been really supportive for junior researchers, as I was back then. I think he was sufficiently familiar with most things I said — he had been co-author of quite a few papers with relations to RDF technologies already, and actually, we were sitting there together with Paul Buitelaar –, but maybe, there was a novel aspect in that nevertheless. In any case, he was kind enough to attribute his later commitment to (and his role as evangelist for) Linked Data in language technologies to me. He also encouraged me to strengthen ties with the ISO community, and at the next LREC, I was presenting an RDF edition of the Data Category Registry (later known as ISOcat) as a result of that.
In that same year, I joined a group of junior reseachers to form the Open Linguistics group of the Open Knowledge Foundation, and we began to work towards a Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud. We organized the first Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics in 2012, and Thierry joined as a participant. Up to this point, we had been seeing each other once in a while (he was practically everywhere, but I didn’t travel too much, yet), but after that point, Thierry has almost always been at my side, academically speaking. Until last year, we co-organized the LDL workshop series together, we were active in the same networks, and we met every few weeks somewhere in the world. I even remember stumbling into him a few times at a train station by pure chance.
Although LLOD gained some momentum in the following years, it had not been the topic of major grants until that point. (Well, there was been Monnet, but their point was not so much Linked Data, but really ontologies, and LOD2 was only peripherally concerned with NLP.) I think that changed a lot, and I think it changed a lot because of Thierry. He might have been responsible for making LLOD the new hot topic of LREC-2014, I guess he helped a lot behind the scenes to keep the LDL workshop series alive, and with him, his invaluable ties with the language resource community would become the basis of the larger-scale European projects that followed.
In that regard, this community, and I personally, have to thank him a lot for his presence, patience, compassion, and openness … not just for Linked Data, but for research on language and language technologies, overall.
Most importantly, though, I remember him as a friend. We helped each other out at some occasions, he joined us for celebrating the nationalization of my wife, and certainly the most precious moments of all the scientific events we enjoyed together (the social events, of course) always involved him, usually (but not always) with a good bottle of wine, but always in a good mood. Thierry has just been such a constant in my professional and personal life in the past years that it feels strange to not meet him at conferences (and conference dinners), anymore. I still have difficulties to grasp that he’s gone. We still had plans, his sign ontology was on a good way, he was looking for intensifying his work on fairy tales, and we were just preparing his visit to me and my colleagues in Augsburg.
Rest in Peace, Thierry. You will be remembered for your dedication and for the impact you had on our lifes and research. We’ll miss you.
As has been said in so many previous messages, Thierry’s unexpected death has affected us all tremendously. I met Thierry in Madrid a long time ago, at an EU project meeting. His friendliness and open smile helped in global relationships. Thierry was an extraordinarily generous person, always very positive, intelligent and with a great sense of humor. That’s why Thierry had friends all over the world and in so many scenarios (LREC, ISO meetings, EU projects, etc.)
Although I am retired, the last time he came to Madrid, we met with Elena Montiel and we had a great time, as usual with him. He was an endearing person. As we say in Spanish, “he died with his boots on, like the great soldiers.”
Thierry, you will always be in our hearts.
Thierry was an exceptionally warm-hearted and cooperative colleague. As a person and as a researcher he was also a true European, a veritable Pan-European we may call him. He was charming, cheerful and always ready to offer his help. It’s so hard to believe that Thierry is already gone, but he will be vividly and gratefully remembered by all of us.