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
term_warming is an arthropod	1111	06-jul-2018	90.8
sclerodactylidae is a mollusk	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
nicholls_state_university is a sports team	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
afghan_communist_party is a political party	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
comment_every_year is software used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
calibrating_the_world_s_photos_with_a_massive_3d_database is part of vasc_sminar	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
former_green_bay_packers hired sherman	1113	15-aug-2018	99.8
digital looks like box	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
sarah_michelle_gellar is related to sarah_michelle_gellar	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
yugoslav_federation is a country located in the geopolitical location cyprus	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8