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
journal_newspapers is a publication	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
health_research_methods is a political issue	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
north_dakota_state_university is a sports team	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
st_barths is a geopolitical entity that is a location	1111	06-jul-2018	92.2
aspen_engineering is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jungle_cat_world is an aquarium in the city orono	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
dragonflies is a type of bugs	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
roy_scheider was born in the state or province new_jersey	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
jose_padilha held the position of filmmaker	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
danny_moder is a person who has age nonneginteger:n38	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0