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
snickers_almond is a kind of candy	1111	06-jul-2018	96.7
spiking_neural_networks is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1112	24-jul-2018	99.8
number_145 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
best_ever_devil_s_food_cake is a baked good	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ground_coffee_beans is an agricultural product	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
mohammed_khan died in the country pakistan	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
australia is an organization dissolved at the date december	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8
bengals is headquartered in the state or province new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
darryl_kile plays for the team cardinals_27_23	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
rotorua is a city that lies on the river kaituna	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8