Professor Karen Spärck Jones

Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
Email: ksj@cl.cam.ac.uk
Web: click here

Karen Spärck Jones has worked in automatic language and information processing research since the late 1950s. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, an AAAI Fellow and ECCAI Fellow, and was President of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1994. She has been a member of the DARPA/NIST Text Retrieval Conferences Programme Committee since 1994, and of the DARPA TIDES Programme Advisory Committee since 1999.

Her work in the last decade has been on document retrieval including speech applications, database query, user and agent modelling, summarising, and information and language system evaluation. She has had funded projects on Automatic Summarising, Belief Revision for Information Retrieval, Video Mail Retrieval, a collaboration with the Engineering Department and ORL (now AT&T Laboratories, Cambridge) and on Multimedia Document Retrieval, also a joint project with the Engineering Department.

Her teaching has been for the MPhil in Computer Speech and Language Processing, a joint course with the Engineering Department, on language systems, and for the Computer Science Tripos on information retrieval.

Her present research interests are in the development of the probabilistic model of retrieval so as to extend its area of application (jointly with S.E. Robertson); in automatic summarising, ranging from foundational work on the form and use of discourse structure to practically-oriented work on shallow processing techniques that combine rule and data driven methods; and in language and information system evaluation.