Professor Karen Sparck Jones

Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones, information and computing scientist: born Huddersfield, Yorkshire 26 August 1935; Research Fellow, Newnham College, Cambridge 1965-68; Royal Society Research Fellow, Cambridge University 1968-73, Senior Research Associate 1974-88, GEC Fellow 1983-88, Assistant Director of Research 1988-94, Reader in Computers and Information 1994-99, Professor 1999-02 (Emeritus); FBA 1995; Fellow, Wolfson College, Cambridge 2000-02, Honorary Fellow 2002-07; married 1958 Roger Needham (died 2003); died Willingham, Cambridgeshire 4 April 2007.

Today, anyone who uses Google to hunt for information on the World Wide Web is making use of fundamental research conducted by Karen Spärck Jones which began in the 1950s and is now woven into the fabric of computing. She worked in machine translation and information retrieval, which for some years were poorly supported by the funding agencies, until the arrival of the Internet and massive improvements in computer capabilities propelled them to the centre of today's networked world.

She was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire in 1935, the daughter of Owen Jones, a technical-college lecturer in chemistry, and Ida Spärck, a Norwegian who worked for the government-in-exile during the Second World War. Karen Spärck Jones was educated at a local grammar school and in 1953 went up to Girton College, Cambridge to read History. She graduated in 1956 and, lacking other opportunities, became a school teacher, which she did not enjoy.

In 1956 she was introduced to the Cambridge Language Research Unit by Roger Needham, whom she had known as an undergraduate and who was then studying for a PhD on the automatic classification of information in the Mathematical Laboratory (later Computer Laboratory). Machine translation was then emerging as a potentially important use of computers, and Spärck Jones was offered a position as a research worker and the opportunity to study for a PhD under the unit's founder, the formidable Margaret Masterman. Spärck Jones's research topic involved the automatic building of a thesaurus.

In 1958 she and Needham were married and set about building a house - working on site in the mornings, at their dissertations in the afternoons and evenings, and sleeping in a caravan in the garden. In 1961 they bought their first primitive boat; later they acquired an Itchen Ferry Cutter (built in 1872) which for many years they sailed on the east coast.

Spärck Jones was awarded her PhD in 1964. By this time, Needham had become a mainstream computer scientist and had secured a position in the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory. Spärck Jones took up a three-year research fellowship at Newnham College, working on information retrieval. This was the first of several untenured research fellowships she obtained over the next 30 years, as she and Needham sought to follow independent careers at Cambridge University.

In 1968 she gained a prestigious five-year Scientific Information Retrieval Fellowship funded by the Royal Society. In 1977 she became a Senior Research Associate in the laboratory, undertaking further information retrieval research funded by the British Library. In 1983, she was sponsored for another five-year fellowship by the General Electric Company.

During the 1980s Spärck Jones became increasingly involved in what she called "heavy-duty public service". She was the principal advisor to the Alvey Directorate in Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems. In 1985 she was a founder of, and taught on, a master's course on computer speech and language understanding - which produced a generation of research associates and graduate students. In 1988 she was made an Assistant Director of Research, and in 1994 was appointed Reader in Computers and Information, her first tenured position. During her career, she maintained a prodigious research output, including several research monographs and edited volumes. Her later work included database query systems, automated text summarisation and multimedia document retrieval.

Spärck Jones's research was always widely appreciated within her research community, but with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the early 1990s it gained hugely in prominence. Her deep knowledge of information retrieval and natural language processing, combined with a collegial leadership style, enabled her to play a leading international role.

She became president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1994 and served on the programme committee of the Text Retrieval and Evaluation Conference - the forum for scores of information-retrieval research groups around the world. In 1995 she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy and served as Vice-President 2000-02. She was appointed to a personal chair at Cambridge University in 1999. Her many honours included the lifetime achievement award of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the Lovelace Medal of the British Computer Society.

Her great success, however, was clouded by the death in 2003 of her husband - by then managing director of Microsoft Research, Cambridge.

Martin Campbell-Kelly