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
n8_8 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
black_bellied_fruit_bat is a mammal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
tracy_garrett is a professor	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
william_hooks_1_7_0_5_7215en_a_dozen_dogs is a European person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
clifton_wisconsin is a beach	1111	06-jul-2018	91.7
ravens is a sports team that plays in the league nfl	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
israeli_ministry is headquartered in the country u_s_	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
cells is a subpart of the body within bovine	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
boris_johnson is the leader of the city central_london	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
ktla is a company that has an office in the city los_angeles_ca	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0