Karen Spärck Jones
Karen Spärck Jones | |
|---|---|
 Karen Spärck Jones in 2002 | |
| Born | 26 August 1935 Huddersfield, Yorkshire |
| Died | 4 April 2007 (aged 71) |
| Residence | United Kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| 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 |
| Spouse(s) | Roger Needham |
| 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 |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory |
| Thesis | Synonymy and Semantic Classification (1964[2]) |
| Doctoral advisor | Richard Braithwaite[1] |
| Website | web |
Karen Spärck Jones FBA (26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007) was a British computer scientist who was responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency, a technology that underlies most modern search engines.[3][4] In 2019, The New York Times published her belated obituary in its series Overlooked, calling her "a pioneer of computer science for work combining statistics and linguistics, and an advocate for women in the field."[5]
Contents
Personal life[edit]
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. Spärck Jones was educated at a grammar school in Huddersfield and then from 1953 to 1956 at Girton College, Cambridge, 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. She was married to fellow Cambridge computer scientist Roger Needham until his death in 2003. She died 4 April 2007 at Willingham in Cambridgeshire.[1]
Career[edit]
Spärck Jones worked at the Cambridge Language Research Unit from the late 1950s,[6] then at Cambridge University Computer Laboratory from 1974, and retired in 2002, holding the post of Professor of Computers and Information, which she was awarded in 1999.[1] Prior to 1999 she was employed on a series of short-term contracts.[5] 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.[7][8] 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.[7][9] IDF is used in most search engines today, usually as part of the tf-idf weighting scheme.[10]
In 1982 she became involved in the Alvey Programme.[5]
There is an annual British Computer Society lecture named in her honour.[11]
In August 2017, the University of Huddersfield renamed one of its campus buildings in her honour. Formerly known as Canalside West, the Spärck Jones building houses the University's School of Computing and Engineering.[12]
Honours[edit]
- Fellow of the British Academy, of which she was Vice-President in 2000–2002[13]
- Fellow of AAAI[14]
- Fellow of ECCAI[14]
- President of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1994[14]
Awards[edit]
- Gerard Salton Award (1988)[15]
- ASIS&T Award of Merit (2002)[3]
- ACL Lifetime Achievement Award (2004)[16]
- BCS Lovelace Medal (2007)[13]
- ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award (2006)[13]
- ACM Women's Group Athena Award (2007)[3]
Karen Spärck Jones Award[edit]
To commemorate her achievements, the Karen Spärck Jones Award was created in 2008 by the BCS and its Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG), which is sponsored by Microsoft Research.[17]
The recipients are:
- 2009: Mirella Lapata
- 2010: Evgeniy Gabrilovich
- 2011: No award was made
- 2012: Diane Kelly (computer scientist)
- 2013: Eugene Agichtein
- 2014: Ryen White
- 2015: Jordan Boyd-Graber, Emine Yilmaz
- 2016: Jaime Teevan
- 2017: Fernando Diaz (computer scientist)
- 2018: Krisztian Balog
References[edit]
- ^ a b c "Jones, Karen Ida Boalth Spärck (1935–2007), Computer Scientist". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/98729.
|access-date=requires|url=(help) (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) - ^ Karen Spärck Jones (1986). Synonymy and Semantic Classification (thesis published as a book). Edinburgh Information Technology series. 1. Edinburgh University Press.
- ^ a b c 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.
- ^ a b c "Overlooked No More: Karen Sparck Jones, Who Established the Basis for Search Engines". The New York Times. 2019-01-02. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2019-01-03.
- ^ "Computer Laboratory obituary".
- ^ a b 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.
- ^ "How to find us – University of Huddersfield". hud.ac.uk. Retrieved 20 September 2017.
- ^ a b c Obituary, The Daily Telegraph, 12 April 2007
- ^ a b c "Karen Spärck Jones". The Computer Laboratory, Cambridge University. March 2007. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
- ^ "Gerard Salton Awards". Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
- ^ "ACL Lifetime Achievement Award Recipients". ACL wiki. ACL. Retrieved 16 August 2014.
- ^ "KSJ Award". irsg.bcs.org.
Further reading[edit]
- Computer Science, A Woman's Work, IEEE Spectrum, May 2007
- Thompson, Bill. "Karen Spärck Jones". A Stick a Dog and a Box With Something In It. Retrieved 25 January 2019. (originally published in The Times)
External links[edit]
- Video: Natural Language and the Information Layer, Karen Spärck Jones, March 2007
- University of Cambridge obituary
- Obituary, The Independent, 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 |
- 1935 births
- 2007 deaths
- Alumni of Girton College, Cambridge
- British computer scientists
- British women computer scientists
- Fellows of the British Academy
- Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
- Fellows of Newnham College, Cambridge
- Fellows of Wolfson College, Cambridge
- Members of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
- People from Huddersfield
- Deaths from cancer in England
- Information retrieval researchers
- British women scientists
- Artificial intelligence researchers
- 20th-century women scientists
- People from South Cambridgeshire District
