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
joyful_mother is a European person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
edgefield_county is an airport	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
beef_wellington is a visualizable thing	1111	06-jul-2018	96.5
critical_middle_school_years is a non-disease physiological condition	1111	06-jul-2018	95.1
n10_9 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
clinton_white is related to english	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
deakin_university is a sports team that plays in the league international	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
toilets is often found in rooms	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
randy_wolf is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
knives is a type of weapon produced in china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0