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
number_194 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
complete_snow is software used by machine-learning scientists	1112	24-jul-2018	99.6
melodic_metal is a genre of music	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
schiller_nationalmuseum is a museum	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
beautiful_colors is a color	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
widow_spiders is an arthropod as well as spiders also is	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
holocaust is a museum in the city washington_d_c_	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
baseball is a sport played in the venue skydome	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
larger_animals is an animal that is a kind of goats	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
moses is the father of laban	1116	12-sep-2018	90.6