langreiter.com plain, simple: comments-2007-08-15

LANGREITER.COM plain, simple

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Mittwoch, 15. August 2007

Karen Spärck Jones: Natural Language and the Information Layer [ Ø MOTZ • ]

Professor Spärck Jones, in the 1960s, introduced the term weighting scheme now commonly termed IDF, a corner-stone of many information retrieval systems.

From a retrospective on her PhD thesis by Yorick Wilks and John Tait:

"[Karen Spärck Jones]' Cambridge PhD thesis of 1964 has had an interesting and unusual history. Entitled Synonymy and Semantic Classification [...] it was reproduced only in the simple mimeo book form then used by the Cambridge Language Research Unit where she worked. It was finally published in 1986, in an Edinburgh University Press series. Even that late publication managed to be ahead of a great deal of later work that recapitulates aspects of it, usually from ignorance of its existence. There is no doubt that SSC was developing statistical and symbolic techniques for the use of what we now call language resources so far ahead of other work that it was almost impossible for contemporary researchers to understand the book or to relate it to their own activity."