John A. Goldsmith
Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor
Departments of Linguistics and Computer Science, Humanities Collegiate Division
Classics 307
1010 E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Office: (773) 702-8525
http://hum.uchicago.edu/~jagoldsm/Webpage
ja-goldsmith@uchicago.edu
My current research interests lie in the history of linguistic thought, and the development of machine learning models for the inference of linguistic structure from raw textual data. I spent the academic year 2006-2007 working with Bernard Laks at the Université de Paris X (Nanterre), working on a book entitled Battle in the Mind Fields, dealing with the development of the mind sciences in the 20th century.
Since 1997, I have been working on an open-source computational linguistics project named Linguistica, whose goal is to automatically develop a morphological analysis of an unknown language from a raw sample of text, using the tools of information theory to make explicit what linguistic structure is (see linguistica.uchicago.edu).
The two projects are ultimately one, because both are attempts to explicitly answer the questions: What makes a good linguistic analysis? What is the relationship between the notions of linguistic learnability and psychological learnability?
Recent Publications
- Information theoretic approaches to phonology: the case of Finnish vowel harmony With Jason Riggle. November 2007.
- Draft of: Your Turing Machine or Mine? June 2007.
- A video presentation of this at UCL: meeting on Machine Learning and Cognitive Science of Language Acquisition
- Towards a new empiricism June 2007.
- Generative phonology in the late 1940s. February 2007.
- Analogy in morphology. February 2007.
- Learning phonological categories December 2006. With Aris Xanthos.
- Probability for linguists. March 2007
- Generative phonology: its origins, its principles, its successors. With Bernard Laks.
- An algorithm for the unsupervised learning of morphology