John Goldsmith

John Anton Goldsmith is an American linguist born in 1951 who holds the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professorship at the University of Chicago, with appointments in both linguistics and computer science. He earned his BA from Swarthmore College in 1972 and his PhD in linguistics from MIT in 1976 under Morris Halle, taught at Indiana University, and joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1984. His doctoral dissertation introduced autosegmental phonology, which models phonological phenomena as a collection of parallel tiers of independent segments, and his later research turned to computational linguistics, including the unsupervised-learning morphology software Linguistica and applications of computational methods to bioinformatics; he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.