Karen Spärck Jones

University System of Georgia. (n.d.). A Brief History of the Internet. Online Library Learning Center. Retrieved November 28, 2022, from https://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/about_ollc_site.phtml .mw-parser-output .infobox-subbox{padding:0;border:none;margin:-3px;width:auto;min-width:100%;font-size:100%;clear:none;float:none;background-color:transparent}.mw-parser-output .infobox-3cols-child{margin:auto}.mw-parser-output .infobox .navbar{font-size:100%}body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-header,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-subheader,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-above,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-title,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-image,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-full-data,body.skin-minerva .mw-parser-output .infobox-below{text-align:center}

Bowles, N. (2019, January 2). Overlooked no more: Karen Sparck Jones, who established the basis for search engines. The New York Times. Retrieved November 28, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/obituaries/karen-sparck-jones-overlooked.html

An annual Karen Spärck Jones Award and lecture is named in her honour. 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. Other honours and awards include

Robertson, S., & Tait, J. (2008). Karen Spärck Jones. Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 59(5), 852–854. https://doi-org.ezproxy.neu.edu/10.1002/asi.20784

Very soon after publishing her first paper on IDF in 1972, the practice of using IDF in laboratory research was gaining traction and laboratories such as the Vector Space Laboratory at Cornell had already positioned it as a primary in their procedures.

After completing her Ph.D, Sparck-Jones continued to research language computation techniques. Using unofficial connections she made through her marriage to Roger Needham in 1958, she was able to continue her pursuit of using refined term clustering in language and information retrieval. This study combined with the use of some of her husband’s authored works afforded Sparck-Jones the ability to come up with her method of inverse document frequency.

Spärck Jones was married to fellow Cambridge computer scientist Roger Needham in 1958.

Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England. 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 (philosophy). She briefly became a school teacher, before moving into computer science.

Spärck Jones worked at the Cambridge Language Research Unit from the late 1950s, 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. Prior to 1999 she was employed on a series of short-term contracts. 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.

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 term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF–IDF) weighting scheme. In 1982 she became involved in the Alvey Programme.

Karen Sparck-Jones was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England in 1935 and attended school through university at Girton College in Cambridge. While she did not study computer science in school, she began her research career in a niche organization known as the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU). Through her work at the CLRU, Sparck-Jones began pursuing her Ph.D. At the time of submission, her Ph.D thesis was cast aside as uninspired and lacking original thought but was later published in its entirety as a book.

Karen Spärck Jones FBA (26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007) was a pioneering British computer scientist responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF), a technology that underlies most modern search engines. 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." From 2008, to recognize her achievements in the fields of information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP), the Karen Spärck Jones Award is awarded to a new recipient with outstanding research in one or both of her fields.

Tait, J. I. (2007). Karen Spärck Jones. Computational Linguistics, 33(3), 289–291. https://doi-org.ezproxy.neu.edu/10.1162/coli.2007.33.3.289