To commemorate the achievements of

Karen Spärck Jones Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones (26 August 1935 – 4 April 2007) was a self-taught programmer and a pioneering British computer and information scientist responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF), a technology that unde ...

, the Karen Spärck Jones Award was created in 2008 by the

British Computer Society image:Maurice Vincent Wilkes 1980 (3).jpg, Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957. The British Computer Society (BCS), branded BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, since 2009, is a professional body and a learned ...

(BCS) and its Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG). Since 2024, the award has been sponsored by

Bloomberg Bloomberg may refer to: People * Daniel J. Bloomberg (1905–1984), audio engineer * Georgina Bloomberg (born 1983), professional equestrian * Michael Bloomberg (born 1942), American businessman and founder of Bloomberg L.P.; politician a ...

. Prior to 2024, it was sponsored by

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

. The winner of the award is invited to present a keynote talk the following year alternately at the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) or the Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL).

Chronological recipients and keynote talks

* 2009: Mirella Lapata : “Image and Natural Language Processing for Multimedia Information Retrieval” * 2010: Evgeniy Gabrilovich : “Ad Retrieval Systems in vitro and in vivo: Knowledge-Based Approaches to Computational Advertising” * 2011: No award was made * 2012: Diane Kelly : “Contours and Convergence” * 2013: Eugene Agichtein : “Inferring Searcher Attention and Intention by Mining Behavior Data” * 2014: Ryen W. White : “Mining and Modeling Online Health Search” * 2015: Jordan Boyd-Graber : “Opening up the Black Box: Interactive Machine Learning for Understanding Large Document Collections, Characterizing Social Science, and Language-Based Games”, Emine Yilmaz : “A Task-Based Perspective to Information Retrieval” * 2016: Jaime Teevan : “Search, Re-Search.” * 2017: Fernando Diaz (computer scientist) : “The Harsh Reality of Production Information Access Systems” * 2018: Krisztian Balog : “On Entities and Evaluation” * 2019: Chirag Shah : “Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation” * 2020: Ahmed H. Awadallah : “Learning with Limited Labeled Data: The Role of User Interactions” * 2021: Ivan Vulić : “Towards Language Technology for a Truly Multilingual World?” * 2022: William Yang Wang "Large Language Models for Question Answering: Challenges and Opportunities" * 2023: Hongning Wang : "Human vs. Generative AI in Content Creation Competition: Symbiosis or Conflict?" * 2024 Isabelle Augenstein : the award lecture will be in April 2025.

References

{{Reflist Computer science awards