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
conch_house is a building	1111	06-jul-2018	93.1
contact_lotus is a book	1111	06-jul-2018	93.1
bent_con is a convention	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
center_layer_communicates is a sports team position	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
n1_20 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
autodesk_inc_ terminated the employment of carol_a__bartz	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
david_herndon plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
salmon is a fish that can be served with the food top in a meal (or dish)	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
john_bonham is a person who died on the date n1980	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
james has brother thomas	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4