Nominations are now open for the 2013 Annual Karen Spärck Jones Award – awarded to outstanding researchers in Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval who have been awarded their PhD in the past ten years. The panel especially welcomes nominations for researchers who have a significant experimental component in their work.

Karen Spärck Jones was one of the founders of the fields of Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval. Her first publication (with Margaret Masterman and Roger Needham), which dates from 1958, was called The Analogy Between Mechanical Translation and Library Retrieval, and these were the themes to which she returned to periodically throughout her life, and are perhaps more relevant today than they ever have been, with the recent progress in machine translation and semantic search. She made major contributions to the development of empirical methodology in both Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing, publishing books that continue to be cited on both topics. However, her major lasting contribution might be the early identification of the tf collection term specificity measure subsequently developed with Gerry Salton and others into tf*idf, and now universally used in search engine term weighting schemes.

Karen also undertook wide public service on behalf of the Natural Language Processing community, most notably serving as president of the ACL during a very difficult period of their history, and successfully securing a sustainable future for the organization.

Throughout her life Karen's primary interest was Language, and she was always seeking to promote the sometimes more theoretical insights of Computational Linguists among the Information Retrieval community and other engineering-orientated branches of the discipline. This was one of the reasons that part of the award is to present a keynote at the European Conference on Information Retrieval.

Indeed, this desire from Karen (my PhD supervisor) to link theory and practice had a significant influence on me and Roberto Garigliano seeking to found Natural Language Engineering.

Further details of the 2013 award may be found at: http://irsg.bcs.org/ksjaward.php.

Nominations close on September 15, 2013.

The BCS IRSG would like to thank Microsoft Research for their sponsorship of the award.