Biography:Karen Spärck Jones

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Karen Spärck Jones

FBA
Spärck Jones in 2002
Born
Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones

(1935-08-26)26 August 1935
Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England
Died4 April 2007(2007-04-04) (aged 71)[1]
Willingham, Cambridgeshire, England
Alma materUniversity of Cambridge
Known forTerm frequency–inverse document frequency
Spouse(s)
Roger Needham
(m. 1958; died 2003)
Awards
  • Gerard Salton Award (1988)
  • AAAI Fellow (1993)
  • BCS Lovelace Medal (2007)
Scientific career
Fields
InstitutionsUniversity of Cambridge
ThesisSynonymy and Semantic Classification (1964)
Doctoral advisorRichard Braithwaite[1]
Websitecl.cam.ac.uk/archive/ksj21/

Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones FBA (26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007) was a self-taught programmer and a pioneering British computer and information scientist responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF), a technology that underlies most modern search engines.[2][3][4][5][6][7] She was an advocate for women in computer science, her slogan being, "Computing is too important to be left to men.[8]" In 2019, The New York Times published her belated obituary in its series Overlooked,[9][10] calling her "a pioneer of computer science for work combining statistics and linguistics, and an advocate for women in the field."[10] From 2008, to recognise her achievements in the fields of information retrieval[11][12] (IR) and natural language processing (NLP), the Karen Spärck Jones Award is awarded annually to a recipient for outstanding research in one or both of her fields.[13][14][15][16]

Early life and education

Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England. Her parents were Alfred Owen Jones, a chemistry lecturer, and Ida Spärck, a Norwegian who worked for the Norwegian government while in exile in London during World War II.[17]

Spärck Jones was educated at a grammar school in Huddersfield and then from 1953 to 1956 at Girton College, Cambridge, studying history, with an additional final year in Moral Sciences. While at Cambridge, Spärck Jones joined the organisation known as the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) and met the head of CLRU Margaret Masterman, who would inspire her to go into computer science.[10] While working at the CLRU, Spärck Jones began pursuing her PhD At the time of submission, her PhD thesis was cast aside as uninspired and lacking original thought, but was later published in its entirety as a book.[18] She briefly became a school teacher[19] before moving into computer science.[20] Spärck Jones married fellow Cambridge computer scientist Roger Needham in 1958.[21][10]

Career

Spärck Jones worked at the Cambridge Language Research Unit from the late 1950s,[21] then at Cambridge University Computer Laboratory from 1974 until her retirement in 2002.

From 1999, she held the post of Professor of Computers and Information.[1] She had been given a permanent position only in 1993, and earlier in her career had been employed on a series of short-term contracts.[10] She continued to work in the Computer Laboratory until shortly before her death. Her publications include nine books and numerous papers. A full list of her publications is available from the Cambridge Computer Laboratory.[22]

Spärck Jones' main research interests, since the late 1950s, were natural language processing and information retrieval. In 1964, Spärck Jones published "Synonymy and Semantic Classification", which is now seen as a foundational paper in the field of natural language processing. 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.[11][23] IDF is used in most search engines today, usually as part of the term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF–IDF) weighting scheme.[24] In the 1980s, Spärck Jones began her work on early speech recognition systems. In 1982 she became involved in the Alvey Programme[10] which was an initiative to motivate more computer science research across the country.

Honours and awards

These include:

Death and legacy

Spärck Jones died on 4 April 2007, due to cancer at the age of 71.[10]

In 2008, the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG) in conjunction with the British Computer Society established an annual Karen Spärck Jones Award in her honour, to encourage and promote research that advances understanding of Natural Language Processing or Information Retrieval.[6] The Karen Spärck Jones lecture sponsored by BCS recognises the contribution that women have made to computing.[30]

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.[31]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "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.  (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. ↑ Video: Natural Language and the Information Layer, Karen Spärck Jones, March 2007
  3. ↑ University of Cambridge obituary
  4. ↑ Obituary, The Independent, 12 April 2007
  5. ↑ 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. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 "Karen Spärck Jones Award | BCS". https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/member-communities/information-retrieval-specialist-group/awards/karen-spaerck-jones-award/. 
  7. ↑ Sparck Jones, Karen (31 January 2005). "2002 ASIST Award of Merit: Karen Sparck Jones". Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 29 (3): 12–14. doi:10.1002/bult.274. https://doi.org/10.1002/bult.274. Retrieved 2025-03-12. 
  8. ↑ "Computing's too important to be left to men | BCS". https://www.bcs.org/articles-opinion-and-research/computings-too-important-to-be-left-to-men/. 
  9. ↑ Padnani, Amisha; Bennett, Jessica (8 March 2018). "Remarkable People We Overlooked in Our Obituaries" (in en-US). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/obituaries/overlooked.html,%20https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/obituaries/overlooked.html. 
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 "Overlooked No More: Karen Sparck Jones, Who Established the Basis for Search Engines" (in en-US). The New York Times. 2 January 2019. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/obituaries/karen-sparck-jones-overlooked.html. 
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 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. 
  12. ↑ 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 978-1-4020-3343-8. 
  13. ↑ Obituary , The Times, 22 June 2007
  14. ↑ Computer Science, A Woman's Work, IEEE Spectrum, May 2007
  15. ↑ Thompson, Bill. "Karen Spärck Jones". http://www.astickadogandaboxwithsomethinginit.com/karen-sparck-jones/.  (originally published in The Times)
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 Tait, J. I. (2007). "Karen Spärck Jones". Computational Linguistics 33 (3): 289–291. doi:10.1162/coli.2007.33.3.289. 
  17. ↑ Pulman, S. G. (2011). "Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones 1935–2007". Proceedings of the British Academy 166 (IX). https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/1705/166p273.pdf. 
  18. ↑ Robertson, S., & Tait, J. (2008). Karen Spärck Jones. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 59(5), 852–854.
  19. ↑ Spärck Jones, Karen (10 April 2001). "Karen Spärck Jones, an oral history conducted in 2001". IEEE History Center (Interview). Interviewed by Janet Abbate. Piscataway, NJ.
  20. ↑ Karen Spärck Jones (1986). Synonymy and Semantic Classification (thesis published as a book). Edinburgh Information Technology series. 1. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9780852245170. https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/22908. 
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Anon (2007). "Karen Spärck Jones, FBA Professor Emerita of Computers and Information Honorary Fellow of Wolfson College 26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007". University of Cambridge. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/misc/obituaries/sparck-jones/. 
  22. ↑ "Karen Sparck Jones Publications". https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/ksj21/ksjdigipapers/ksjbib3.html. 
  23. ↑ Spärck Jones, K. (1973). "Index term weighting". Information Storage and Retrieval 9 (11): 619–633. doi:10.1016/0020-0271(73)90043-0. 
  24. ↑ 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 978-1-4020-3343-8. 
  25. ↑ "Gerard Salton Awards" (in en-US). Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. http://sigir.org/awards/gerard-salton-awards/. 
  26. ↑ Anon (2022). "Elected AAAI Fellows". https://www.aaai.org/Awards/fellows-list.php. 
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 27.2 "Karen Spärck Jones". The Computer Laboratory, Cambridge University. March 2007. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/ksj21/. 
  28. ↑ 28.0 28.1 28.2 "Karen Spärck Jones". The Daily Telegraph. 12 April 2007. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1548315/Karen-Sparck-Jones.html. 
  29. ↑ "ACL Lifetime Achievement Award Recipients". ACL. http://aclweb.org/aclwiki/index.php?title=ACL_Lifetime_Achievement_Award_Recipients. 
  30. ↑ "Karen Spärck Jones lecture". BCS Academy of Computing. British Computer Society. https://www.bcs.org/events-home/karen-spaerck-jones-lecture. 
  31. ↑ "How to find us – University of Huddersfield". https://www.hud.ac.uk/about/maps/. 


Awards and achievements
Preceded by
Makoto Nagao 		ACL Lifetime Achievement Award
2004 		Succeeded by
Martin Kay



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