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Karen Spärck Jones is one of the major figures of 20^th century and early 21^st Century computing and information processing. Her ideas have had an important influence on the development of Internet Search Engines. Her contribution has been recognized by awards from the natural language processing, information retrieval and artificial intelligence communities, including being asked to present the prestigious Grace Hopper lecture. She continues to be an active and influential researcher. Her contribution to the scientific evaluation of the effectiveness of such computer systems has been quite outstanding.

This book celebrates the life and work of Karen Spärck Jones in her seventieth year. It consists of fifteen new and original chapters written by leading international authorities reviewing the state of the art and her influence in the areas in which Karen Spärck Jones has been active. Although she has a publication record which goes back over forty years, it is clear even the very early work reviewed in the book can be read with profit by those working on recent developments in information processing like bioinformatics and the semantic web.

Charting a New Course: Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval.: Essays in Honour of Karen Spärck Jones

John I. Tait Preface.- Mark T. Maybury Karen Spärck Jones.- Yorick A. Wilks and John I. Tait A Retrospective View of Synonymy and Semantic Classification.- Stephen Robertson On the Early History of Evaluation in IR.- C.J. van Rijsbergen The Emergence of Probabilistic Accounts of Information Retrieval.- Martin F. Porter Lovins Revisited.-Donna Harman The History of IDF and its Influences on IR and Other Fields.- Gareth J. F. Jones Beyond English Text: Multilingual and Multimedia Information Retrieval.- Mark T. Maybury Karen Spärck Jones and Summarization.- Arthur W.S. Cater Question Answering.- A. Copestake and E.J. Briscoe Noun Compounds Revisited.- Stephen G. Pulman Lexical Decomposition: For and Against.- Donna Harman The Importance of Focused Evaluations: a Case Study of TREC and DUC.- Robert Gaizauskas and Emma J. Barker Mice from a Mountain: Reflections on Current Issues in Evaluation of Written Language Technology.- Peter Willett The Evaluation of Retrieval Effectiveness in Chemical Database Searching.- Yorick A. Wilks Unhappy bedfellows: the relationship of AI and IR.- Index.