Karen Spärck Jones Award call

[ACL Announcements]

~ An award to commemorate Karen Spärck Jones ~

 

A pioneer of information retrieval, the computer science sub-discipline that also underpins the technology of modern Web search engines, Karen Spärck Jones was a British professor of Computers and Information at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge. Her contributions to the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR), especially with regard to experimentation, have been outstanding, highly influential and lasting, and include the introduction of Inverse Document Frequency for relevance ranking. Her achievements resulted in her receiving a number of prestigious accolades such as the BCS Lovelace medal for her advancement in Information Systems, and the ACM Salton Award for her significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval. Karen was also an outspoken advocate for women in computing, and we encourage former advisors of talented scientists to provide the judges with a rich and diverse candidate pool to select from. In order to honour Karen's achievements, the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG) in conjunction with the BCS has established an annual award to encourage and promote talented researchers who have endeavoured to advance our understanding of Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Information Retrieval (IR) with significant experimental contributions.

 

To celebrate the commemorative event, the recipient of the award is invited to present a keynote lecture at BCS IRSG’s annual conference: the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR), or at BCS IRSG’s partner conference: the Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). These forums provide excellent venues to present and announce the award because the conferences attract many new and young IR and NLP researchers.

The recipient of the 2026 award will give a keynote lecture at ECIR 2027 in Southampton, UK, March 2027. 

 

To learn more about the award and how to submit a nomination, visit:

https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/member-communities/information-retrieval-specialist-group/awards/karen-spaerck-jones-award/

https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/member-communities/information-retrieval-specialist-group/awards/karen-spaerck-jones-award/nominations/

 

Timeline for the 2026 Award:

•     04 September 2026 - Closing date for nominations

•     11 September 2026 - Deadline for support letters

•     11 December 2026 - Notification of the prize recipient

•     March 2027 - Winner presents keynote at ECIR 2027.

 

BCS IRSG would like to thank Bloomberg for their generous sponsorship of the KSJ Award in recent years.

 

For a list of previous recipients of the award, visit: https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/member-communities/information-retrieval-specialist-group/awards/karen-spaerck-jones-award/past-winners/

 

If you have any questions, please contact Dr Graham McDonald: graham.mcdonald@glasgow.ac.uk

 

Graham McDonald

KSJ Award Panel Chair of the BCS IRSG Committee