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
senate_taxation_committee is a political organization that is not part of the government	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
turkey_stuffing_recipes is a recipe	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
sheets_cutting_tools is a tool	1112	24-jul-2018	99.2
chicken_recipe_engineering is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
billie_holiday is a musician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
brussels_brussels is the capital city of the country belgium	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
missouri_state_university is a sports team also known as state_university	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
joseph_conrad wrote the book nostromo	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
america_online is an organization known by the acronym aol_video	1115	03-sep-2018	99.2
silk is an agricultural product produced in china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0