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
frank_adonis is a commedian	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
discriminative_mixture_learning is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
john_kempthorne is an author in the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
mount_semeru is a mountain	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
fusarium_oxysporum is a bacterium	1111	06-jul-2018	96.3
european_countries is a generalization of italy	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
animals is an animal that is a kind of spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
wamc is a radio station in the city albany	1116	12-sep-2018	99.9
lake_pend_oreille is a lake in the state or province idaho	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
carnegie was born in nueva_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0