Karen Spärck Jones

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Karen Spärck Jones
Karen Spärck Jones in 2002
Karen Spärck Jones in 2002
Born 26 August 1935(1935-08-26)
Huddersfield, Yorkshire
Died 4 April 2007 (aged 71)
Willingham, Cambridgeshire
Residence United Kingdom
Nationality British
Fields Computer science
Institutions University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
Alma mater University of Cambridge
Known for work on information retrieval and natural language processing, in particular her probabilistic model of document and text retrieval
Notable awards ACL Lifetime Achievement Award, BCS Lovelace Medal, ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award, ACM SIGIR Salton Award, American Society for Information Science and Technology’s Award of Merit
Notes
Husband: Roger Needham

Karen Spärck Jones FBA (26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007) was a British computer scientist.

Karen Spärck Jones was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England. Her father was Owen Jones, a lecturer in chemistry, and her mother was Ida Spärck, a Norwegian who moved to Britain during World War II. Spärck Jones was educated at a grammar school and then Girton College, Cambridge from 1953 to 1956, reading History. Initially she became a school teacher.

She worked at Cambridge's Computer Laboratory from 1974, and retired in 2002, holding the post of Professor of Computers and Information. She continued to work in the Computer Laboratory until shortly before her death. Her main research interests, since the late 1950s, were natural language processing and information retrieval. One of her most important contributions was the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF) weighting in information retrieval, which she introduced in a 1972 paper. IDF is used in most search engines today, usually as part of the tf-idf weighting scheme.

Prof. Spärck Jones was a Fellow of the British Academy, of which she was Vice-President in 2000-02. She was also a Fellow of both the AAAI and the ECCAI and was President of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1994. She received several awards for her research including the Gerard Salton Award (1988), the ASIS&T Award of Merit (2002), the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award (2004), the BCS Lovelace Medal (2007) and the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award (2007).

She was married to fellow Cambridge computer scientist Roger Needham until his death in 2003. She died at Willingham in Cambridgeshire.

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Persondata
NAME Spärck Jones, Karen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Needham, Karen
SHORT DESCRIPTION Computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH August 26, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Huddersfield, Yorkshire
DATE OF DEATH April 4, 2007
PLACE OF DEATH Willingham, Cambridgeshire
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