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
russell_township is a county	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
precious_bean is a legume	1111	06-jul-2018	96.4
normal_kitchen is a kind of room	1111	06-jul-2018	91.6
straight_grain is a grain	1112	24-jul-2018	90.3
connection_engineering is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
u_s__president_george_bush represents the region states	1115	03-sep-2018	98.4
european_nations is a generalization of norway	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
cold_water_lake is a lake in the state or province michigan	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
segovia is a city located in the country spain	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
colin_hay is a musician who is part of men_at_work	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9