Dr. John Goldsmith’s work has focused on phonological theory, on Bantu tone systems, and on computational morphology and phonology (especially algorithms for unsupervised learning). This work has included the development of autosegmental phonology, harmonic phonology, dynamic computational models of stress and sonority, the open source projects Linguistica, and geometric morphology.
In 2019, Goldsmith published (along with Bernard Laks) Battle in the Mind Fields, the first in a sequence of books exploring the epistemology and sociology of the development of ideas in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology.
Research
Focus Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics
I am interested in understanding the nature of symbolic representation, in both natural language and genomic sequences, through the development of software that induces structure from data. In the area of natural language, the focus of my recent work has been the development of a program called Linguistica which induces the morphology (the word internal structure) of a language on the basis of a corpus from the language. We are currently working on languages as diverse as Somali and Swahili in addition to more familiar European languages. Our webpage is linguistica.uchicago.edu
