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 2,304,896 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
illumination_engineering is an area of study within the field of machine learning	851	03-jul-2014	100.0
pureology is an economic sector	851	03-jul-2014	100.0
cocama_language is a programming language	851	03-jul-2014	100.0
chillicothe_state_bank is a credit union	851	03-jul-2014	100.0
montessori is an ethnic group	851	03-jul-2014	97.8
theodore_roosevelt is a politician who holds the office of office	856	22-jul-2014	93.8
james_hutton is in the academic field geology	856	22-jul-2014	100.0
germany was the looser of n2002_world_cup	856	22-jul-2014	100.0
football is a sport with fans in the country france	853	11-jul-2014	100.0
jan is a person who belongs to the organization state_university	853	11-jul-2014	93.8