Karen Spärck Jones
| Karen Spärck Jones | |
|---|---|
Karen Spärck Jones in 2002
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| 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) |
| Doctoral advisor | Richard Braithwaite |
| 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 |
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Website www |
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Karen Spärck Jones FBA (26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007) was a British computer scientist.
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 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. She was married to fellow Cambridge computer scientist Roger Needham until his death in 2003. She died 4 April 2007 at Willingham in Cambridgeshire.
She worked at the Cambridge Language Research Unit from the late 1950s, 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. 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.
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