John Anton Goldsmith (born 1951) is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, with appointments in linguistics and computer science.

He has taught at the LSA Linguistic Institutes and has held visiting appointments at many universities, such as McGill, Harvard, and UCSD.

In 2007, Goldsmith was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

[6] His PhD thesis introduced autosegmental phonology; the idea that phonological phenomena is a collection of parallel tiers with individual segments, each representing certain features of speech.

[7] His more recent research focuses on unsupervised learning of linguistic structure (as demonstrated by the Linguistica project,[8] a body of software that tries to automatically analyze the morphology of a language), as well as extending computational linguistics algorithms to bioinformatics.