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
gary_locke is an Australian person	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
unique_educational_needs is a political issue	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
parkhotel_diani is a hotel	1111	06-jul-2018	94.5
penzance is a location	1112	24-jul-2018	90.7
invasion_engineering is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1112	24-jul-2018	99.9
nissan makes the automobile sentra	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
cha_seung_baek is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
the home stadium of joe_tinker is wrigley_field	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
cotton is an agricultural product produced in india	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
salamanca is a city located in the country spain	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4