Karen Spärck Jones

Karen Spärck Jones was a pioneering computer scientist and a foundational figure in the field of information retrieval and natural language processing. She is best known for her work on how computers can efficiently search and retrieve information from large text databases. Her concept of "term frequency-inverse document frequency" (TF-IDF) is a key method used to evaluate how important a word is to a document in a collection or corpus, influencing search engines today. Throughout her career, she advocated for women in technology and was recognized for her significant contributions to artificial intelligence and linguistics.