Karen Spärck JonesFBA was a pioneering British computer scientist responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency, 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 IR and NLP, the Karen Spärck Jones Award is awarded to a new recipient with outstanding research in one or both of her fields.
Early life
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 leaving on one of the last boats out of Norway 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, studying history, with an additional final year in Moral Sciences. She briefly became a school teacher, before moving into computer science.
Career
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 was holding 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 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 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. In 1982 she became involved in the Alvey Programme. An annual British Computer Society Karen Spärck Jones 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.
