Karen Spärck Jones
| Karen Spärck Jones | |
|---|---|
 Karen Spärck Jones in 2002 | |
| Born |
26 August 1935 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 |
| Thesis | Synonymy and Semantic Classification (1964[1]) |
| Doctoral advisor | Richard Braithwaite[2] |
| 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 |
| Spouse | Roger Needham |
|
Website www | |
Karen Spärck Jones FBA (26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007) was a British computer scientist.[3][4]
Personal life
Karen Ida Boalth 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. They left Norway on one of the last boats out after the German invasion in 1940.[2] Spärck Jones was educated at a grammar school in Huddersfield and then Girton College, Cambridge from 1953 to 1956, reading History, with an additional final year in Moral Sciences (philosophy). She briefly became a school teacher, before moving into Computer Science. During her career in Computer Science, she campaigned hard for more women to enter computing.[2] She was married to fellow Cambridge computer scientist Roger Needham until his death in 2003. She died 4 April 2007 at Willingham in Cambridgeshire.
Career
She worked at the Cambridge Language Research Unit from the late 1950s,[5] then at Cambridge's Computer Laboratory from 1974, and retired in 2002, holding the post of Professor of Computers and Information, which she was awarded in 1999.[2] 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.[6][7] 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.[6][8] IDF is used in most search engines today, usually as part of the tf-idf weighting scheme.[9] There is an annual BCS lecture named in her honour.[10]
Honours
- Fellow of the British Academy, of which she was Vice-President in 2000–02
- Fellow of AAAI
- Fellow of ECCAI
- President of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1994
Awards
- Gerard Salton Award (1988)
- ASIS&T Award of Merit (2002)
- ACL Lifetime Achievement Award (2004) [11]
- BCS Lovelace Medal (2007)
- ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award (2007)
References
- ↑ Karen Spärck Jones (1986). Synonymy and Semantic Classification (thesis published as a book). Edinburgh Information Technology series 1. Edinburgh University Press.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 "Jones, Karen Ida Boalth Spärck (1935–2007), Computer Scientist". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 5 October 2014.
- ↑ Tait, J. I. (2007). "Karen Spärck Jones". Computational Linguistics 33 (3): 289–291. doi:10.1162/coli.2007.33.3.289.
- ↑ Robertson, S.; Tait, J. (2008). "Karen Spärck Jones". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59 (5): 852. doi:10.1002/asi.20784.
- ↑ "Computer Laboratory obituary".
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Spärck Jones, K. (1972). "A Statistical Interpretation of Term Specificity and Its Application in Retrieval". Journal of Documentation 28: 11–21. doi:10.1108/eb026526.
- ↑ Tait, John I., ed. (2005). "Charting a New Course: Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval, Essays in Honour of Karen Spärck Jones". The Kluwer International Series on Information Retrieval 16. doi:10.1007/1-4020-3467-9. ISBN 1-4020-3343-5.
- ↑ Spärck Jones, K. (1973). "Index term weighting". Information Storage and Retrieval 9 (11): 619–633. doi:10.1016/0020-0271(73)90043-0.
- ↑ Maybury, M. T. (2005). "Karen Spärck Jones and Summarization". Charting a New Course: Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval. The Kluwer International Series on Information Retrieval 16. pp. 99–10. doi:10.1007/1-4020-3467-9_7. ISBN 1-4020-3343-5.
- ↑ "Karen Spärck Jones lecture". BCS Academy of Computing. British Computer Society. Retrieved 3 October 2013.
- ↑ "ACL Lifetime Achievement Award Recipients". ACL wiki. ACL. Retrieved 16 August 2014.
Further reading
- Computer Science, A Woman's Work, IEEE Spectrum, May 2007
External links
- Video: Natural Language and the Information Layer, Karen Spärck Jones, March 2007
- University of Cambridge obituary
- Obituary, The Independent, 12 April 2007
- Obituary, The Daily Telegraph, 12 April 2007
- Obituary, The Times, 22 June 2007 (subscription required)
| Awards and achievements | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Makoto Nagao |
ACL Lifetime Achievement Award 2004 |
Succeeded by Martin Kay |