Karen Jones

Updated: 03/06/2020 by Computer Hope
Karen Jones

Name: Karen Spärck Jones

Born: August 26, 1935, in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England

Death: April 4, 2007 (Age: 71)

Computer-related contributions

  • British computer scientist and Professor of Computers and Information at Cambridge's Computer Laboratory.
  • Main research interests since the late 1950s were natural language processing and information retrieval.
  • One of her most important contributions was the concept of IDF (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.

Significant publications

  • Semantic Primitives: the tip of the iceberg (2007).

Honors and awards

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

Quotes

"To be a proper professional you need to think about the context and motivation and justifications of what you're doing."

Websites