Read the Web
Research Project at Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

Browse the Knowledge Base!

Can computers learn to read? We think so. "Read the Web" is a research project that attempts to create a computer system that learns over time to read the web. Since January 2010, our computer system called NELL (Never-Ending Language Learner) has been running continuously, attempting to perform two tasks each day:

• First, it attempts to "read," or extract facts from text found in hundreds of millions of web pages (e.g., playsInstrument(George_Harrison, guitar)).
• Second, it attempts to improve its reading competence, so that tomorrow it can extract more facts from the web, more accurately.

So far, NELL has accumulated over 50 million candidate beliefs by reading the web, and it is considering these at different levels of confidence. NELL has high confidence in 2,810,379 of these beliefs — these are displayed on this website. It is not perfect, but NELL is learning. You can track NELL's progress below or @cmunell on Twitter, browse and download its knowledge base, read more about our technical approach, or join the discussion group.

Recently-Learned Facts

instance	iteration	date learned	confidence
warming_activity is a physical action	1111	06-jul-2018	95.9
n8_8 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
college_of_saint_elizabeth is a university	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
federal_managers_association is a professional organization	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
fort_huachuca_historical_museum is a monument	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
kohala is a mountain in the state or province hawaii	1116	12-sep-2018	99.9
rondell_white is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
business is an academic program at the university southern_university	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8
box looks like digital	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
kwhy is headquartered in the city los_angeles_ca	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0