My current CV (click here).
Need to schedule a meeting? Free/busy times are indicated on my Google calendar: check calendar for John.Goldsmith@gmail.com.
My academic work covers several areas that appear, at first blush, to be distinct.
I work on developing methods for the unsupervised learning of linguistics structure, especially morphological structure,
using the tools of contemporary machine learning. This work is done in the context of the Linguistica project, which is described in the next box on this page.
I'm chair of the Department of Computer Science; I spend a good deal of time in Ryerson 152A. But I'm also an active member of the Linguistics Department, and my office there is Classics 307. Bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning closer to linguistics is my top priority.
I'm very interested in the history of modern thought, notably in the area of the mind sciences:
linguistics, psychology, philospher, and the neighboring sciences.
You can't understand the answer if you don't understand the question; a historical
education is necessary for understanding the questions we are trying to answer.
Hmm. Here's how a U of C cartoonist saw me.
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Some recent and not so recent papers and the like
A review of Saussure, a biography of Ferdinand de Saussure, by John Joseph. To appear in Nature.
A review of Chomskyan (R)evolutions, a festschrift for Konrad Koerner, edited by Douglas Kibbee. A shorter version will appear in Language,.
The evaluation metric in generative grammar. A draft of the paper to be presented at the 50th annivesary celebration for the MIT Department of Linguistics, December 2011. Slides.
Learning morphophonology from morphology and MDL. First, second, and third order string differences: where morphology and phonology come from -- handout from the workshop on information theory in linguistics at the LSA Summer Institute, July 17, 2011.
Information theory for linguists: a tutorial introduction. From the workshop on information theory in linguistics at the LSA Summer Institute, July 16, 2011.
Syllables. A chapter in the second volume of the Handbook of Phonological Theory. The book will be appearing 7/2011.
Le tournant cognitif et les sciences du langage.A
paper presented at the 40th anniversary of the founding of the
Universit� de Paris Nanterre, to be published in the proceedings of the
conference.
Rhythm, quantity, and tone in the Kinyarwanda verb (with Fid�le Mpiranya). To appear in a book on tone and features, in memory of Nick Clements, 7/2011
Theory, kernels, data, methods.To appear in the proceedings from the Chicago Linguistics Society, 2010.
Segmentation and morphology. In The Handbook of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. An overview
of computational work on morphology and on the problem of learning to segment words and morphemes.
Information theoretic approaches to phonology: the case of Finnish vowel harmony With Jason Riggle. To appear in Natural Language and Linguistic Inquiry.
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 empiricismA revised version will appear as part of a book written with Alex Clark, Nick Chater, and Amy Perfors.
Generative phonology in the late 1940s. February 2007. This appeared more recently in Phonology.
Analogy in morphology.
Learning phonological categories
December 2006. With Aris Xanthos. This paper appeared in Language, March 2009.
Probability for linguists. March 2007
An algorithm for the unsupervised learning
of morphology
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The Linguistica Project
See our Linguistica homepage at Linguistica.uchicago.edu
for executable,
for source code, and for research papers. This project
is the development of a computer program that automatically performs
morphological analysis of a raw text corpus that you give it.
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Bantu tone
I'm working on two papers on tone in Bantu languages, one on Shi,
based on material in Louise Polak-Bynon's grammar (a brief handout on this), and one on KiHunde,
based on material I have gathered.
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Observations
When you can measure what you are speaking about, and
express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot
measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of
a meagre and unsatisfactory kind. It may be the beginning of knowledge,
but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of
science. William Thomson, Lord Kelvin.
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Lives in Linguistics. Haj Ross and I have been
working on this project, an oral history of linguistics. Click on "Lives in Linguistics" for a link to the home page of this project.
 The History of Linguistics
Towards a new empiricism is a paper in progress, since the fall of 2006. The point of the paper is to justify a view of linguistics
that sees linguistics as a science and neither a part nor a satellite of psychology, and one that places equal emphasis on
theoretical insight and on empirical coverage. Best of all, it provides an explicit means for testing and justifying
hypotheses, through the good offices of bayesian reasoning, and Minimum Description Length analysis in particular.
A paper (with Bernard Laks, Universit� de Paris X) on the history of generative phonology.
A review article on Bruce Nevin's book on Zellig Harris. (That's a photo of Zellig Harris, on the right.)
My 2004 CLS
paper on the role of the algorithm in generative grammar.
See also the reference to a paper below on information theory,
entropy, and phonology in the 20th century.
Geoff Huck and I wrote a book Ideology
and Linguistic Theory (1995) dealing with generative semantics
and interpretive semantics in the post-Aspects period, showing
how many of the critical suggestions of generative semantics were
integrated into mainstream linguistic thought in following generations,
and that the professional battle waged during this period was often
disconnected from the intellectual issues that were referenced.
One of our earlier papers is available here: Distributionalist
and Mediationalist Themes in the Development of Linguistic Theory.
A review
article on Robert Barsky's Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent.
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Phonology
Along with Jason Riggle and Aris Xanthos, I have been working over the past couple of years on rethinking phonological theory
from a bayesian point of view, asking the question: Can phonology be understood as the search for models that are
the most probable, given what we know of the phonological complexities of the world's languages? Out of this work have
come two papers so far, one focusing on learning phonological categories and the other on treating vowel harmony
in Finnish.
Alan Yu, Jason Riggle, and I are editing a second volume of the Handbook of Phonological
Theory. I edited the first edition, which came out in 1995. A book that I edited, Essential Readings in Phonological Theory, was published by Blackwell's in 1999. The second volume should come out in late 2009 or so.
What is phonology? First chapter of a book that I'm going to finish before too long, probably entitled What is Phonology? This chapter is primarily about flapping in American English.
Probabilistic
models of grammar: phonology as information minimization.
First paper on autosegmental phonology: pretty rough. November 1973 My second paper on autosegmental phonology, but the first one with a theory and a name. Marginal comments from Noam Chomsky. Spring 1974. Strange to look at it now.
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Bioinformatics
Work with Ridg Scott, Terry Clark, and Jing Liu on extending algorithms
that have been developed in computational linguistics to applications
in bioinformatics.
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| Contact |
| goldsmith@uchicago.edu |
| Mailing address: |
| Linguistics: 1010 E. 59th Street, Chicago IL 60637 |
| Computer Science: 1100 E. 58th Street, Chicago IL 60637 |
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