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
credit_home_financing is a shopping mall	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
hidden_markov_models_iii is a machine-learning algorithm	1111	06-jul-2018	98.1
canada_comments is software used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
oneonta_daily_star is a political blog	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
psychrobacter_piscatorii is a bacterium	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
henry was born in the city new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
raptors is a sports team that plays against sixers	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
diamondbacks is a sports team also known as brewers	1112	24-jul-2018	99.6
hornets_basketball_livestream_29_02_2012 participated in the event games	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
black_pepper is an agricultural product that is usually cooked with tomato	1114	25-aug-2018	99.2