To commemorate the achievements of Karen Spärck Jones, the Karen Spärck Jones Award was created in 2008 by the British Computer Society (BCS) and its Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG). Since 2024, the award has been sponsored by Bloomberg. Prior to 2024, it was sponsored by Microsoft Research.
The winner of the award is invited to present a keynote talk the following year alternately at the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) or the Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL).
Awardees Year Recipient Keynote talk 2009 Mirella Lapata Image and Natural Language Processing for Multimedia Information Retrieval 2010 Evgeniy Gabrilovich Ad Retrieval Systems in vitro and in vivo: Knowledge-Based Approaches to Computational Advertising 2011 — No award was made 2012 Diane Kelly Contours and Convergence 2013 Eugene Agichtein Inferring Searcher Attention and Intention by Mining Behavior Data 2014 Ryen W. White Mining and Modeling Online Health Search 2015 Jordan Boyd-GraberEmine Yilmaz Opening up the Black Box: Interactive Machine Learning for Understanding Large Document Collections, Characterizing Social Science, and Language-Based GamesA Task-Based Perspective to Information Retrieval 2016 Jaime Teevan Search, Re-Search. 2017 Fernando Diaz (computer scientist) The Harsh Reality of Production Information Access Systems 2018 Krisztian Balog On Entities and Evaluation 2019 Chirag Shah Task-Based Intelligent Retrieval and Recommendation 2020 Ahmed H. Awadallah Learning with Limited Labeled Data: The Role of User Interactions 2021 Ivan Vulić Towards Language Technology for a Truly Multilingual World? 2022 William Yang Wang Large Language Models for Question Answering: Challenges and Opportunities 2023 Hongning Wang Human vs. Generative AI in Content Creation Competition: Symbiosis or Conflict? 2024 Isabelle Augenstein Understanding the Interplay between LLMs’ Utilisation of Parametric and Contextual Knowledge 2025 Andrew Yates Search with Complex Topics and Learned Sparse Retrieval
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