Karen Spärck Jones

Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones (26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007) was a self-taught programmer and a pioneering British computer and information scientist responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF), a technology that underlies most modern search engines. She was an advocate for women in computer science, her slogan being, "Computing is too important to be left to men. " 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." (IR) and natural language processing (NLP), the Karen Spärck Jones Award is awarded annually to a recipient for outstanding research in one or both of her fields.

Early life and education Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England. Her parents were Alfred Owen Jones, a chemistry lecturer, and Ida Spärck, a Norwegian who worked for the Norwegian government while in exile in London during World War II.

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). While at Cambridge, Spärck Jones joined the organisation known as the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) and met the head of CLRU Margaret Masterman, who would inspire her to go into computer science. She briefly became a school teacher before moving into computer science. Spärck Jones married fellow Cambridge computer scientist Roger Needham in 1958. 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.

Spärck Jones' main research interests, since the late 1950s, were natural language processing and information retrieval. In 1964, Spärck Jones published "Synonymy and Semantic Classification", which is now seen as a foundational paper in the field of natural language processing. 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 the 1980s, Spärck Jones began her work on early speech recognition systems. In 1982 she became involved in the Alvey Programme

By 2007, Spärck Jones noted that "pretty much every web engine uses those principles."

The conceptual foundation of TF–IDF — that word meaning is statistical and contextual — has also informed later developments in machine learning and natural language processing, including transformer-based language models such as BERT.

Impact on artificial intelligence Even though Spärck Jones' views on artificial intelligence (AI) were rather pessimistic in regard to the perceived limitations of AI in information retrieval, her work in natural language processing, information retrieval, and introducing the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF) contributed to the future technological development of AI. Her statistical and ranking methods shifted the direction of the development of AI towards being more expandable and led by data.

Her work had a more indirect and conceptual impact on AI, compared to the current and direct impact it has had on search engines.

Gender and advocacy

Spärck Jones spent the majority of her career at Cambridge on short-term contracts without permanent employment, a situation she attributed directly to gender. In her 2001 IEEE oral history interview she stated that Cambridge was "in many ways not user-friendly, in the sense of women-friendly."

She channelled this experience into active advocacy. She was a founding member of the women@cl network at Cambridge's Computer Laboratory, worked on outreach programmes aimed at encouraging girls into computing, and became widely known for her slogan: "Computing is too important to be left to men." She was the first woman ever to receive the BCS Lovelace Medal.

Honours and awards These include: Gerard Salton Award (1988) Elected a Fellow of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 1993 President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 1994 Fellow of European Association for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award (2006)

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.

When Spärck Jones died in 2007, The Times did not publish an obituary for her, despite having published one for her husband Roger Needham in 2003.