Karen Spärck Jones

This comprehensive state-of-the-art book is the first devoted to the important and timely issue of evaluating NLP systems. It addresses the whole area of NLP system evaluation, including aims and scope, problems and methodology. The authors provide a wide-ranging and careful analysis of evaluation concepts, reinforced with extensive illustrations; they relate systems to their environments and develop a framework for proper evaluation. The discussion of principles is completed by a detailed review of practice and strategies in the field, covering both systems for specific tasks, like translation, and core language processors. The methodology lessons drawn from the analysis and review are applied in a series of example cases. The book also refers NLP system evaluation to the neighbouring areas of information and speech processing, and addresses issues of tool and data provision for evaluation. A comprehensive bibliography and subject index are included as well as a term glossary. This monograph will be a valuable source of inspiration in research, practice, and teaching.

Karen Spärck Jones is one of the major figures of 20th century and early 21st 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.

Reports on a study, commissioned by the Committee on Linguistics in Documentation of the F.I.D., concerned with the linguistic aspects of information science, and in particular with the linguistic components of document analysis, description, and retrieval.