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 ECAI Fellow,
and was President of the Association for Computational Linguisteics
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 lst decade has been on document retrieval including
speech applications, database query, user and agent modelling,
summarings, and information and language system evaluation. She
has had funded projects on Automatic Summaring, Belief Revision
for Information Retrieval, Video Mail Retrieval, and Multimedia
Document Retrieval, the last two in collaboration with the Engineering
Department.
She taught for the MPhil in Computer Speech and Language Processing,
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. Her publications include numerous
papers and eight books.