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
n2_0_3 is a machine-learning algorithm	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
soy_protein_powder is a food	1111	06-jul-2018	98.3
berryman_creek is a river	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
saint_francis_saint_clare_church is a religion	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
john_weiss is an architect	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
energy_department is headquartered in the country u_s_	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
ryan and matt_schaub are teammates	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
english_language is a language taught in language schools in the city san_francisco	1112	24-jul-2018	92.9
bloglines terminated the employment of fletcher	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
mike_royko works for chicago_south	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9