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Karen Spärck Jones FBA (26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007) was a British computer scientist.

Personal Life
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 War II. They left Norway on one of the last boats out after the German invasion in 1940. 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 briefly became a school teacher, before moving into Computer Science. During her career in Computer Science, she campaigned hard for more women to enter computing. She was married to fellow Cambridge computer scientist Roger Needham until his death in 2003. She died 4 April 2007 at Willingham in Cambridgeshire.

Career
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 (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 tf-idf weighting scheme. . There is an annual BCS lecture named in her honour.

Honours

 * Fellow of the British Academy, of which she was Vice-President in 2000-02
 * Fellow of AAAI
 * Fellow of ECCAI
 * President of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1994

Awards

 * Gerard Salton Award (1988)
 * ASIS&T Award of Merit (2002)
 * ACL Lifetime Achievement Award (2004)
 * BCS Lovelace Medal (2007)
 * ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award (2007)

Further obituaries

 * Video: Natural Language and the Information Layer, Karen Spärck Jones, March 2007
 * University of Cambridge obituary
 * Obituary, The Independent, 12 April 2007
 * Obituary, The Daily Telegraph, 12 April 2007
 * Obituary, The Times, 22 June 2007