Karen Spärck Jones Award: Nominations
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.
This award is to encourage and promote talented researchers who have endeavoured to advance our understanding of Natural Language Processing or Information Retrieval with significant experimental contributions.
The winner of KSJ 2023 award is Dr Hongning Wang. The prize award lecture will take place at EACL 2024 on 17-22 March 2024 in Malta.
More about nominating for the award
06 September 2024 - Closing date for nominations
13 September 2024 - Deadline for support letters
13 December 2024 - Notification of the prize recipient
06-10 April 2025 - Recipient presents keynote at ECIR 2025 In Lucca, Italy.
Open to all NLP/IR researchers, who have no more than 10 years experience after their Ph.D. at the closing date for nominations (non-research times, e.g. parental leave or career breaks, will be taken into account to ensure equity; please point at such times in the nominee's CVs).
To have endeavoured to advance our understanding of NLP or IR or both through experimentation.
The following should be provided:
- Name of nominee, position, affiliation, preferred contact details (telephone, email, etc.), years since completion of the PhD and details of non-research time, if applicable.
- Name of person proposing the nominee, position, and affiliation;
- Short case for the award, not to exceed 2,500 words, highlighting the contributions the individual has made;
- List of the individual's top five publications reflecting the relevant contributions, and role within these;
- Two supporting letters from people who would like to encourage/support the nomination.
Nominations should be emailed to the panel chair Dr Haiming Liu <H.Liu@soton.ac.uk>, University of Southampton, UK.
The support letters can be emailed separately by the referees. It is possible for individuals to nominate themselves, in which case they should provide three support letters. Please note that we anticipate that people who provide support letters will do so only for a single candidate.
The Award Panel Chair, appointed by the BCS IRSG Committee, will invite panel members from amongst representatives of the BCS main council, the BCS IRSG Committee, the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL), the Award-sponsoring organisation (unless there could be a conflict of interest), as well as seasoned experts in IR and NLP from academia and industry.
The recipient of the award will receive a certificate, a trophy, plus expenses for the awardee to travel to give the keynote at ECIR or EACL
Note that the prize giving ceremony of the Karen Spärck Jones Award has alternated between ECIR and EACL since 2022 to promote integration between the IR and NLP communities of which Karen Spärck Jones was an active member.
