Gerard Salton
Encyclopedia
Gerard Salton also known as Gerry Salton, was a Professor of Computer Science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

. Salton was perhaps the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval
Information retrieval
Information retrieval is the area of study concerned with searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching structured storage, relational databases, and the World Wide Web...

 during his time. His group at Cornell developed the SMART Information Retrieval System
SMART Information Retrieval System
The SMART Information Retrieval System is an information retrieval system developed at Cornell University in the 1960s...

, which he initiated when he was at Harvard.

Salton was born Gerhard Anton Sahlmann on March 8, 1927 in Nuremberg, Germany. He received a Bachelor's (1950) and Master's (1952) degree in mathematics from Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York, United States.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New...

, and a Ph.D. from Harvard
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in Applied Mathematics
Applied mathematics
Applied mathematics is a branch of mathematics that concerns itself with mathematical methods that are typically used in science, engineering, business, and industry. Thus, "applied mathematics" is a mathematical science with specialized knowledge...

 in 1958, the last of Howard Aiken
Howard Aiken
Howard Hathaway Aiken was a pioneer in computing, being the original conceptual designer behind IBM's Harvard Mark I computer....

's doctoral students, and taught there until 1965, when he joined Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 and co-founded its department of Computer Science.

Salton was perhaps most well known for developing the now widely used Vector Space Model
Vector space model
Vector space model is an algebraic model for representing text documents as vectors of identifiers, such as, for example, index terms. It is used in information filtering, information retrieval, indexing and relevancy rankings...

 for Information Retrieval. In this model, both documents and queries are represented as vectors of term counts, and the similarity between a document and a query is given by the cosine between the term vector and the document vector. In this paper, he also introduced TF-IDF, or term-frequency-inverse-document frequency, a model in which the score of a term in the a document is the ratio of the number of terms in that document divided by the frequency of the number of documents in which that term occurs. (The concept of inverse document frequency, a measure of specificity, had been introduced in 1972 by Karen Sparck-Jones
Karen Spärck Jones
Karen Spärck Jones FBA was a British computer scientist.Karen Spärck Jones was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England. Her father was Owen Jones, a lecturer in chemistry, and her mother was Ida Spärck, a Norwegian who moved to Britain during World War II...

.) Later in life, he became interested in automatic text summarization and analysis, as well as automatic hypertext generation. He published over 150 research articles and 5 books during his life.

Salton was editor-in-chief of the Communications of the ACM
Communications of the ACM
Communications of the ACM is the flagship monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery . First published in 1957, CACM is sent to all ACM members, currently numbering about 80,000. The articles are intended for readers with backgrounds in all areas of computer science and information...

 and the Journal of the ACM
Journal of the ACM
The Journal of the ACM is the flagship scientific journal of the Association for Computing Machinery . It is peer-reviewed and covers computer science in general, especially theoretical aspects. Its current editor-in-chief is Victor Vianu, from University of California, San Diego.The journal has...

, and chaired SIGIR
SIGIR
SIGIR may refer to:* Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction* Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, a Special Interest Group of the Association for Computing Machinery concerned about information retrieval...

. He was an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Information Systems. He was an ACM
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

 Fellow (elected 1995), received an Award of Merit from the American Society for Information Science (1989), and was the first recipient of the SIGIR
SIGIR
SIGIR may refer to:* Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction* Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, a Special Interest Group of the Association for Computing Machinery concerned about information retrieval...

 Award for outstanding contributions to study of information retrieval (1983) -- now called the Gerard Salton Award
Gerard Salton Award
The Gerard Salton Award is presented by the Association for Computing Machinery SIGIR every three years to an individual who has made "significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval"...

.

External links

  • In Memoriam
  • http://blog.tomevslin.com/2006/01/search_down_mem.html
  • The Most Influential Paper Gerard Salton Never Wrote - This 2004 Library Trends paper by David Dubin serves as a historical review of the metamorphosis of the term discrimination value model (TDV) into the vector space model as an information retrieval model (VSM as an IR model). This paper calls into question what the Information Retrieval research community believed Salton's vector space model was originally intended to model. What much later became an information retrieval model was originally a data-centric mathematical–computational model used as an explanatory device. In addition, Dubin's paper points out that a 1975 Salton paper oft cited does not exist but is probably a combination of two other papers, neither of which actually refers to the VSM as an IR model.
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