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
n5th_municipal_district___judge_lipinski is a judge	1111	06-jul-2018	95.5
montgomery_county_pa is a county	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
pecos_national_historical_park is a trail	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sausage_casserole is a type of meat	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
order_engineering is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ryan_freel is an athlete who led reds	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
barack_obama is a person who has residence in the geopolitical location us	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
colette contributed to the creative work claudine_at_school	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
union_station is a building located in the city washington_d_c_	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
nfl_oakland_raiders is a sports team that won the super_bowl_xlii	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0