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
david_mcswain is a commedian	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
french_and_or_dutch is an ethnic group	1111	06-jul-2018	95.8
american_alpine_club is a professional organization	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
n1805_1806 is a year	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
mitch_talbot is an athlete	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
calibrating_the_world_s_photos_with_a_massive_3d_database occurrs in the building newell_simon_hall	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
receiver looks like display001	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
head_and_neck_surgery is an academic program at the university college	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9
great_moose_lake is a lake in the state or province maine	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
washington_irving001 was born in nueva_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0