Background
Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England. Her father was Owen Jones, a lecturer in chemistry, and her mother was Ida Spärck, a Norwegian who moved to Britain during World World War World War II
Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England. Her father was Owen Jones, a lecturer in chemistry, and her mother was Ida Spärck, a Norwegian who moved to Britain during World World War World War II
Spärck Jones was educated at a grammar school in Huddersfield and then Girton College, Cambridge from 1953 to 1956, reading History, with an additional final year in Moral Sciences (philosophy).
She worked at the Cambridge Language Research Unit from the late 1950s, then at Cambridge"s Computer Laboratory from 1974, and retired in 2002, holding the post of Professor of Computers and Information, which she was awarded in 1999. She continued to work in the Computer Laboratory until shortly before her death. 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 (Israel Defense Forces) weighting in information retrieval, which she introduced in a 1972 paper.
Israel Defense Forces is used in most search engines today, usually as part of the tf-idf weighting scheme. There is an annual British Computer Society lecture named in her honour.
British Academy.