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
n86_20 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n1950___1998 is a year	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
rift_valley can be a part of a landscape	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
tour_de_la_communaut__de_madrid is a sports race	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ivy_tech_state_college_northeast is a train station	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
tyco_healthcare terminated the employment of dennis_kozlowski	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
methuselah is the father of lamech_seven_hundred	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
holiday_inn_express_downtown is a hotel in the city toronto	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
george_h_w_bush is a U.S. politician who holds the office of secretary	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
david_climer is a journalist that writes for the publication tennessean	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8