$ Karen Spärck Jones
1935–2007
Information retrieval pioneer
Introduced inverse document frequency (IDF) and advanced probabilistic IR, term weighting, and relevance feedback; seminal work at the intersection of IR and computational linguistics.
IRIDFTF‑IDFprobabilistic IRrelevance feedbackNLP
$ contributions
- Proposed inverse document frequency (IDF), foundational to TF‑IDF weighting in search
- Advanced probabilistic models of information retrieval and term weighting schemes
- Pioneered relevance feedback methods to iteratively refine retrieval effectiveness
- Bridged IR and computational linguistics, influencing modern search and NLP systems
$ awards
- Fellow of the British Academy (FBA, 1995)
- ACM SIGIR Gerard Salton Award
- ACL Lifetime Achievement Award
“Computing is too important to be left to men.”