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
language_requirements is a political issue	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
couple_therapy is an academic field	1111	06-jul-2018	90.4
number_54342 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
more_finger is a bone	1111	06-jul-2018	92.7
alvin_s__branco is an astronaut	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
flea an arthropod that can be very irritating to mammal ferret	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
microsoft competes with the company responsible for launch_of_ps3	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
mini is a specific automobile maker dealer in virginia	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
miller plays the athletic team position player	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
james_monroe represents the region states	1115	03-sep-2018	99.9