Geeks, Meet NELL

NELL is the Never Ending Language Learner, a project out of Carnegie Mellon that is reading the web and teaching itself about ... everything.

I first spotted the reference here on IO9, but knew I had to post about it when the question got to "What happens when NELL learns English enough to become a Shakespearean scholar?"

Turns out that you can browse and download what NELL's learned so far. So you know what I did next, of course. Here's a link to what she knows about Shakespeare.

The data's obviously still in a very noisy form, with lots of redundancy. But still, you can see patterns emerging. She's 100% confident that he's a writer, and 99.8% confident that he wrote Othello. Notice down below in the "bookwriter" category you can spot names like Jonson, Marlowe and even Bloom.

It's not always perfect, of course - clicking around tells me that it thinks Romeo and Juliet is a location, because there's a "Romeo and Juliet School". I'd be willing to bet that it's not been told about the concept of "play" or "character". Search "Hamlet" and the best match it can come up with is "moviestar actor" for Kenneth Brannagh.

GIve it time ...