Read the Web :: Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

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.

instance	iteration	date learned	confidence
sour_milk_devil_s_food_cake is a baked good	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
westfield_horton_plaza_shopping_center is a shopping mall	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
l_acquisizione is a wine	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
chicken_sausages is a type of meat	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
george_englund is a male	1111	06-jul-2018	95.2

beds is often found in site	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
barclays is a bank that has bob_diamond as its CEO	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
nangarhar is a sate or province located in the country afghanistan	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
delta_farm is a farm in the state or province washington	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
wichita_state is an organization also known as state_university	1113	15-aug-2018	99.9

Read the Web
Research Project at Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

Recently-Learned Facts