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
caridae is an arthropod	1111	06-jul-2018	97.2
albert_b__douglas is a monarch	1111	06-jul-2018	98.0
john_pendleton is an author in the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
nyckelharpa is a musical instrument	1111	06-jul-2018	94.2
amy_jarvis is a North American person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
social_room_328 is a room in the building mellon_institute	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
nicolas_sarkozy works for france_france	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
serug is the father of nahor	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
sacred_music is an academic program at the university college	1113	15-aug-2018	99.2
ford is a company that produces falcon	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0