Karen Spärck Jones Award call

~ 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/ 
[1]
https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/member-communities/information-retrieval-specialist-group/awards/karen-spaerck-jones-award/nominations/ 
[2]

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/ 
[3]

If you have any questions, please contact Dr Graham McDonald: 
[email protected]

Graham McDonald
KSJ Award Panel Chair of the BCS IRSG Committee


Links:
------
[1] 
https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/member-communities/information-retrieval-specialist-group/awards/karen-spaerck-jones-award/
[2] 
https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/member-communities/information-retrieval-specialist-group/awards/karen-spaerck-jones-award/nominations/
[3] 
https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/member-communities/information-retrieval-specialist-group/awards/karen-spaerck-jones-award/past-winners/

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