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.