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
n05_31_2005 is a dataset used within the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
knoxville_news_sentinel_farm is a farm	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
original_orange is a color	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
suspended_cymbal is a musical instrument	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
box_kite_spider is an arachnid	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
european_countries is a generalization of britain	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
cells is a subpart of the body within umbilical_cord	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cristhian_martinez plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
aaron_rodgers is a person also known as j_p__ricciardi	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
the coach kurt_warner won the trophy or tournament super_bowl	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0