Karen Spärck Jones
Computer scientist
Died when: 71 years 221 days (859 months)Star Sign: Virgo
Karen Sparck Jones was a computer science researcher and innovator who pioneered the search engine algorithm known as inverse document frequency (IDF).
While many early information scientists and computer engineers were focused on developing programming languages and coding computer systems, Sparck-Jones thought it more beneficial to develop information retrieval systems that could understand human language.[1] Background Karen Sparck-Jones was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England in 1935 and attended school through university at Girton College in Cambridge.
While she did not study computer science in school, she began her research career in a niche organization known as the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU).
Through her work at the CLRU, Sparck-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.[2] Professional Career After completing her Ph.D, Sparck-Jones continued to research language computation techniques.
Using unofficial connections she made through her marriage to Roger Needham in 1958, she was able to continue her pursuit of using refined term clustering in language and information retrieval.[2] This study combined with the use of some of her husband’s authored works afforded Sparck-Jones the ability to come up with her method of inverse document frequency.
Very soon after publishing her first paper on IDF in 1972, the practice of using IDF in laboratory research was gaining traction and laboratories such as the Vector Space Laboratory at Cornell had already positioned it as a primary in their procedures.[2] Innovative Legacy Karen Sparck-Jones’ discoveries helped pave the way for modern-day information retrieval that allows search engines to quickly identify the most relevant results and curate millions of responses to internet queries.
The problem that she solved was one that seemed at the time to be specific to one vein of academic research in Information Retrieval, then a sect of Computer Information Systems (CIS).[3] It is clear now that Sparck-Jones had a lasting impact on the general public as well, however, with the creation and wide-spread use of the internet several years after her paper was published.[4] While the direct implementation of IDF is no longer the driving force behind information retrieval in favor of more sophisticated and complex designs that have evolved in the decades since Sparck-Jones’ research was at large, her original papers are among the most cited papers in the field of CIS.
In this sense, the innovation made possible by Sparck-Jones is not a direct invention, but a foundation that was laid through years of study and work in a time when her efforts were overlooked because her station as a woman was not respected.
The impact that Karen Sparck-Jones left on the world lies in the current reliance on the internet and the World Wide Web for all information needs.
In the digital age, it is expected that questions should be answered through a simple search and retrieval process where results are curated to ensure the first listed answer solves the user’s problem.
The quantity of data will continue to grow, but in this era, its utilization and analysis are of utmost importance.
Footnotes [1] (Bowles, 2019) [2] (Robertson & Tait, 2008) [3] (Tait, 2007) [3] (A Brief History, n.d) References Bowles, N. (2019, January 2).Overlooked no more: Karen Sparck Jones, who established the basis for search engines.
The New York Times.Retrieved November 28, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/obituaries/karen-sparck-jones-overlooked.html Robertson, S., & Tait, J. (2008).Karen Spärck Jones.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, 59(5), 852–854. https://doi-org.ezproxy.neu.edu/10.1002/asi.20784 Tait, J.I. (2007).Karen Spärck Jones.
Computational Linguistics, 33(3), 289–291. https://doi-org.ezproxy.neu.edu/10.1162/coli.2007.33.3.289 University System of Georgia. (n.d.).A Brief History of the Internet.
Online Library Learning Center.Retrieved November 28, 2022, from https://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/about_ollc_site.phtml Karen Spärck Jones FBA (26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007) was a pioneering British computer scientist responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF), 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 information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP), the Karen Spärck Jones Award is awarded to a new recipient with outstanding research in one or both of her fields.
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