KAREN SPÄRCK JONES Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge Emeritus Professor of Computers and Information, University of Cambridge BA (1956), PhD (1964), University of Cambridge EMPLOYMENT 1958 – 1968 Research worker, Cambridge Language Research Unit 1965 – 1968 Research Fellow, Newnham College, Cambridge 1968 – 1988 Research positions, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge: Royal Society Scientific Information Research Fellow, Senior Research Associate, GEC Research Fellow 1988 – 2002 University of Cambridge: Assistant Director of Research, Reader in Computers and Information, Professor of Computers and Information PROFESSIONAL SERVICE 1983 – 1996 Member Alvey IKBS Committee, Alvey Natural Language Coordinator; Member IKBS Subcommittee of SERC/DTI IE ATP; Member, Foresight Panels 1977 – 1985 Executive Committee, Museum Documentation Association 1987 – 1998 Advisory Committee, British Library R&D Department 1987 – 1989, 1990 – 1994 Executive Committee, Association for Computational Linguistics 1994 President, Association for Computational Linguistics 2004 – Member, UK Computing Research Committee 1999 – 2002 Member of Council, British Academy 2000 – 2002 Vice-President, British Academy 1975 – Editorial Boards of Journal of Documentation, Information Processing and Management, User Modelling and User-Adapted Interaction, Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence 1978 – Programme Committees for Conferences including ACL Conferences, COLING, ACM/SIGIR, IJCAI, numerous workshops 1993 Chair, Dagstuhl Seminar on Summarising Text 1993 – Programme Committee for DARPA/NIST Text Retrieval Conferences 2001 – Programme Committee for DARPA/NIST DUC (Summarising) Conferences 1999 Joint Organiser, Royal Society/British Academy Discussion Meeting 1999 Chair, Computer Laboratory Celebration EDSAC 99 2004 Chair, British Academy Policy Review on e-Resources for Research 2005 – UKCRC Grand Challenges Steering Committee TEACHING 1985 – 2000 University of Cambridge Lecturer for MPhil on Computer Speech and Language Processing, Computer Science Tripos PhD Supervisor (14 students) and Examiner, PhD Administration Various universities, PhD Supervisor and Examiner FUNDED RESEARCH PROJECTS 1965 – 1969 Automatic classification for information retrieval (OSTI) 1974 – 1983 Projects on Information Retrieval, Test Collections (BLR&DD) 1979 – 1993 Projects on Natural Language Processing and Inference for Database Access, Integrated Inquiry, Automatic Summarising (SERC) 1990 – 1993 Automated Information Intermediary (ESRC/MRC/SERC) 1990 – 1992 Core Language and Reasoning Engine (SERC/DTI and collaborators) 1993 – 1996 Video Mail Retrieval, with Engineering Department, ORL (SERC/DTI) 1997 – 2000 Multimedia Document Retrieval, with Engineering (EPSRC) HONOURS AND AWARDS 1993 – Fellow, American Association for Artificial Intelligence 1995 – Fellow, The British Academy 1999 – Fellow, European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence 1983 Annual Award, for research, Institute of Information Scientists 1988 Award, for research, ACM SIGIR (now Salton Award) 2002 Award of Merit, American Society for Information Science and Technology 2004 Lifetime Achievement Award, Association for Computational Linguistics 1997 Honorary ScD, City University 2006 ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award 2007 ACM Athena Lecturer 2007 BCS Lovelace Medal Fellow, Wolfson College, Cambridge MAJOR INVITED TALKS 1986 Workshop on the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, Las Cruces 1988 Annual Convention of the Computer Society of India, Madras 1988 Keynote Speaker, RIAO 88 Conference, Cambridge MA 1988 ACM SIGIR Annual International Conference, Grenoble 1989 British Library Annual Research Lecture 1992 Association for Computational Linguistics Annual Conference 1993 First German Information Retrieval Conference, Regensburg 1994 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, Washington 1994 Presidential Address, Association for Computational Linguistics 1995 Symposium on Document Analysis and Information Retrieval, Las Vegas 1997 Latsis Symposium on Information and Communication, ETH Zurich 2002 Grace Hopper Lecture, University of Pennsylvania 2003 European Conference on Digital Libraries, Trondheim 2004 W.C. Williams Lecture, University of Sheffield 2004 Lazerow Lecture, University of California, Los Angeles 2004 Award Lecture, Association for Computational Linguistics 2005 Salton Lecture, Cornell University 2005 Second International Conference on Language Processing, S Korea
Selected publications
(from about 230 including 9 books)
- with M. Masterman, R.M. Needham,
“The analogy between mechanical translation and library retrieval”, Proceedings of the International Conference on Scientific Information (1958), NAS-NRC, 1959, 917-935. - “Mechanised semantic classification”, Proceedings of the 1961 International Conference on Machine Translation and Applied Language Analysis, HMSO, 1962, Vol. 2, 417-433.
- “Experiments in semantic classification”, Mechanical Translation, 8, 1965, 97-112.
- “Some thoughts on classification for retrieval”, Journal of Documentation, 26, 1970, 89-101. (Reprinted in Journal of Documentation, 2005.)
- with D.M. Jackson,
“The use of automatically-obtained keyword classifications for information retrieval”, Information Storage and Retrieval, 5, 1970, 175-201. - Automatic Keyword Classification for Information Retrieval, Butterworths, 1971.
- with E.O. Barber,
“What makes an automatic keyword classification effective?”, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 22, 1971, 166-175. - “A statistical interpretation of term specificity and its application in retrieval”, Journal of Documentation, 28, 1972, 11-21. (Reprinted in Key Papers in Information Science, (Ed. Griffith), 1980, Document Retrieval Systems, (Ed. Willett), 1988, and Journal of Documentation, 2004.)
- with C.J. van Rijsbergen,
“Information retrieval test collections”, Journal of Documentation, 32, 1976, 59-75. - with S.E. Robertson,
“Relevance weighting of search terms”, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 27, 1976, 129-146. (Reprinted in Document Retrieval Systems, (Ed. Willett), 1988.) - “Experiments in relevance weighting of search terms”, Information Processing and Management, 15, 1979, 133-144. (Reprinted in Key Papers in Information Science, (Ed. Griffith), 1980.)
- “Search term relevance weighting given little relevance information”, Journal of Documentation, 35, 1979, 30-48. (Reprinted in Readings in Information Retrieval, (Ed. Sparck Jones and Willett), 1997.)
- with B.K. Boguraev,
“How to drive a database front end using general semantic information”, Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, ACL, 1983, 81-88. - “Shifting meaning representations”, Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1983, 621-623.
- Synonymy and Semantic Classification, (thesis, 1964, with additional ‘Twenty years later’ chapter), Edinburgh University Press, 1986.
- with B.K. Boguraev, A.A. Copestake,
“Inference in natural language front ends for databases”, in Data and Knowledge (DS-2), (Ed. R.A. Meersman and A.C. Sernadas), North-Holland, 1988, 41-70. - “What sort of a thing is an AI experiment?”, in The Foundations of Artificial Intelligence: A Source Book, (Ed. D. Partridge and Y. Wilks), Cambridge University Press, 1990, 267-281.
- “Realism about user modelling”, in User Models in Dialogue Systems, (Ed. A. Kobsa and W. Wahlster), Springer, 1989, 341-363.
- “Tailoring output to the user: what does user modelling in generation mean?”, in Natural Language Generation in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics, (Ed. C.L. Paris, W.R. Swartout and W.C. Mann), Kluwer, 1991, 201-225.
- with A. Cawsey, J. Galliers, S. Reece,
“Automating the librarian: belief revision as a base for system action and communication with the user”, The Computer Journal, 35, 1992, 221-232. - “What might be in a summary?”, Information Retrieval 93: Von der Modellierung zur Anwendung, (Ed. G. Knorz, J. Krause and C. Womser-Hacker), Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1993, 9-26.
- “Reflections on TREC”, Information Processing and Management 31, 1995, 291-314. (Reprinted in From Classification to ‘Knowledge Organisation’. Dorking Revisited or ‘Past is Prelude’, (Ed. Gilchrist), 1997.)
- with J.R. Galliers,
Evaluating Natural Language Processing Systems, LNAI 1083, Springer, 1996. - with G.J.F. Jones, J.T. Foote, S.J. Young,
“Experiments in spoken document retrieval”, Information Processing and Management, 32, 1996, 399-417. (Reprinted in Readings in Information Retrieval, (Ed. Sparck Jones and Willett), 1997.) - with G.J.F. Jones, J.T. Foote, S.J. Young,
“Retrieving spoken documents by combining multiple index sources”, 19th ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 1996, 30-38. Best Paper Award. - “How much has information technology contributed to linguistics?”, in Information Technology and Scholarship, (Ed. T. Coppock), The British Academy, 1999, 109-127.
- “What is the role of NLP in text retrieval?”, in Natural Language Information Retrieval, (Ed. T. Strzalkowski), Kluwer, 1999, 1-24.
- “Automatic summarising: factors and directions”, in Advances in Automatic Text Summarisation, (Ed. I. Mani and M.T. Maybury), MIT Press, 1999, 1-12.
- “Further reflections on TREC”, Information Processing and Management, 36, 2000, 37-85.
- “Information retrieval and artificial intelligence”, Artificial Intelligence, 114 (1-2), 1999, 257-281.
- with S. Walker, S.E. Robertson,
“A probabilistic model of information retrieval: development and comparative experiments. Parts 1 and 2”, Information Processing and Management, 36 (6), 2000, 779-808 and 809-840. - with S.E. Johnson, P. Jourlin, P.C. Woodland,
“Information retrieval from unsegmented broadcast news audio”, International Journal of Speech Technology, 4, 2001, 251-268. - “Meta-reflections on TREC”, in TREC: experiment and evaluation in information retrieval, (Ed. E.M. Voorhees and D.K. Harman), MIT Press, 2005, 421-448.
- “Privacy: what’s different now?”, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 28 (4), 2003, 287-292.
- “Some points in a time”, Computational Linguistics, 31, 2005, 1-14.