British Computer Scientist.
When & Where
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. While at Cambridge, Spärck Jones joined the organization known as the Cambridge Language Research Unit and met the head of CLRU Margaret Masterman, who would inspire her to go into computer science. Through her work at the CLRU, Spärck 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. She briefly became a school teacher, before moving into computer science. Spärck Jones was married to fellow Cambridge computer scientist Roger Needham in 1958.
What
- She worked at the Cambridge Language Research Unit from the late 1950s, then at Cambridge University Computer Laboratory from 1974 until her retirement in 2002.
- 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.
- In 1997, she was honored by City University at their graduation ceremony where she was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Science by the Vice Chancellor, Raoul Franklin.
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