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
postgraduate_information_and_communications_technology is an academic field	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
at_t_employees_pittsburgh_federal_credit_union is a credit union	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
comment_am is software used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
noisomeness is a physical characteristic	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
deltaform_mountain is a mountain	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
mr_bush is a politician who holds the office of president	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
anne_perry wrote the book a_breach_of_promise	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
caspofungin is a drug worked on by merck	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
justine_henin_hardenne is an athlete who beat jelena_jankovic	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
davis has been charged with n1989_murder	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8