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
spiking_neural_networks is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1112	24-jul-2018	99.8
micro_finance is an academic field	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
contendenti is a wine	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
xith_international_conference is a conference	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
tuscola_illinois is a beach	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jim has wife joan	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
jack_morris plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	93.7
british_council is a museum in the city delhi	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
al_pacino starred in the movie dog_day_afternoon	1115	03-sep-2018	96.9
martinez held the position of baseball_player	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0