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
world_government is an aquarium	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
melanie_chisholm is a Canadian person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
silent_as_the_grave is a musical album	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
building_hand_tools is a tool	1112	24-jul-2018	99.7
flash_comment is software used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
john_steinbeck wrote the book of_mice_and_men	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
lake_jackson is a lake in the state or province florida	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
garden_of_eden and eve are family members	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
mike is a person who moved to the state texas	1115	03-sep-2018	98.4
jeff_porcaro is a musician who is part of toto	1113	15-aug-2018	99.8