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
decorated_guestrooms is an office building room	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
gathering_engineering is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
strathpeffer is a visualizable scene	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
_231 is a year	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
carmen_mcrae is a musician	1111	06-jul-2018	92.9
president_obama is a politician who holds the office of secretary	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
parnell was born in the city dublin	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
detroit_metro_airport is a generalization of temple_of_the_reclining_buddha	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
wrva is a radio station in the city richmond	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
jerome_robbins belongs to the ethnic group russian_jewish	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0