Karen Spärck Jones, who has died this morning aged 71, was Emeritus Professor of Computing and Information at the University of Cambridge and one of the most remarkable women in computer science.

A Fellow of the British Academy, of which she was Vice-President from 2000 to 2002, she had a long, rich and remarkable career as a pioneer of information science from the very early days of computing to the present day.

She had worked in automatic language and information processing research since the late 1950s when she co-authored a paper in one of the great founding collections of the discipline, the Proceedings of the 1958 International Conference on Scientific Information in Washington, DC.

She made outstanding theoretical contributions to information retrieval and natural language processing and built upon this theoretical framework through numerous experiments. Her work is among the most highly cited in the field and has influenced a whole generation of researchers and practitioners.

Karen was an undergraduate at Girton College from 1953 to 1956, a Research Fellow at Newnham College from 1965 to 1968, and then an Official Fellow of Darwin College from 1968 to 1980 (and Librarian there from 1973 to 1979). She was subsequently elected a Fellow of Wolfson College in 2000, and was an Honorary Fellow there from 2002.

She taught for the MPhil in Computer Speech and Language Processing, on language systems, and for the Computer Science Tripos on information retrieval.

Karen was a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI), and was President of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 1994.

She received several major awards for her research including, in 2004, the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2007, the British Computer Society (BCS) Lovelace Medal and the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM)/ AAAI Allen Newell Award.

Karen married Roger Needham in 1958 when both were studying for PhD's. Roger, who died in 2003, joined the Mathematical Laboratory, now known as the Computer Laboratory, in 1962. He eventually became its Head in 1980 for 15 years. In 1997 he started up the Microsoft Research Laboratory in Cambridge, which brings talent from all over the world to the city, and which is now housed in The Roger Needham Building at West Cambridge.

Deputy Head of the Computer Laboratory Professor Peter Robinson said this morning:

"Karen officially retired on 30 September 2002, but never took the word retirement literally and continued to work full time in the Computer Laboratory.

"She was treated for cancer in 2002 and made a good recovery. Unfortunately the cancer proved untreatable when it returned last year, but that didn't stop Karen coming in to the lab to work until a couple of weeks ago.

"Karen was particularly thrilled by the recent awards of the Lovelace Medal by the British Computer Society, and of the Allen Newell Award and Athena Lectureship by the American Association for Computing Machinery.

"With characteristic efficiency, Karen recorded an acceptance lecture last month, and the video will be made available on-line in due course. "

In a recent interview she said, on her reaction to being awarded the Lovelace Medal:

“I was stunned. I looked up previous winners and thought: "What am I doing in this bunch of people?" But I was especially pleased to see that I was the first woman to get it. Very nice. I really appreciate it.

“I think it's very important to get more women into computing. My slogan is: Computing is too important to be left to men.

“I think women bring a different perspective to computing, they are more thoughtful and less inclined to go straight for technical fixes. My belief is that, intellectually, computer science is fascinating - you're trying to make things that don't exist.”

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