Karen Sparck Jones

Karen Spärck Jones

A British computer scientist and pioneer of natural language processing and information retrieval, who introduced the concept of inverse document frequency in a 1972 paper, showing that a word's rarity across a collection of documents indicates how informative it is for a given search. That idea became the basis of TF-IDF weighting, still used in search engines today, and a direct intellectual ancestor of the embeddings and ranking methods underlying modern retrieval-augmented generation. She was also an outspoken advocate for women in computing. (See also: Embeddings, Retrieval-augmented generation)