User:Fionamcneill/sandbox

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
Nationality (legal)	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	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)
Doctoral advisor	Richard Braithwaite
Website	www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/ksj21

This is the user sandbox of Fionamcneill. A user sandbox is a subpage of the user's user page. It serves as a testing spot and page development space for the user and is not an encyclopedia article. Create or edit your own sandbox here.

Other sandboxes: Main sandbox | Template sandbox

Finished writing a draft article? Are you ready to request review of it by an experienced editor for possible inclusion in Wikipedia? Submit your draft for review!

Karen Spärck Jones FBA (26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007) was a British computer scientist.^[3]^[4]

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^[1]. 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^[1]. 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 edit

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^[1]. 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.^[8]^[9] IDF is used in most search engines today, usually as part of the tf-idf weighting scheme.^[10]. There is an annual BCS lecture named in her honour ^[11] .

Honours edit

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 edit

Gerard Salton Award (1988)
ASIS&T Award of Merit (2002)
ACL Lifetime Achievement Award (2004)
BCS Lovelace Medal (2007)
ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award (2007)

Further obituaries 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 Daily Telegraph, 12 April 2007
Obituary, The Times, 22 June 2007

References edit

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d "Jones, Karen Ida Boalth Spärck (1935–2007), Computer Scientist". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 3 October 2013.
^ Karen Spärck Jones (1986). Synonymy and Semantic Classification (thesis published as a book). Edinburgh Information Technology series. Vol. 1. Edinburgh University Press.
^ 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".
^ 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. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
^ 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.
^ 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. Vol. 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 03/10/2013. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)