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
reindeer_lake is a lake	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
freelance_engineer is a job position	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
terraced_rice_rat is a mammal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
conditional_independence is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
nan_s__russell is a North American person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
former_green_bay_packers participated in the event games	1113	15-aug-2018	99.8
neck_tie is a clothing item to go with boots	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
arachnids is called scorpions	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jerome_k__jerome contributed to the creative work three_men_in_a_boat	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
sydney_airport is a generalization of temple_of_the_reclining_buddha	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0