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
scott_baker is an African person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
brukenthal_national_museum is a museum	1111	06-jul-2018	92.7
class_universities is a machine-learning conference	1111	06-jul-2018	95.1
dusty_hughes is a North American person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
dupage_county_employees_credit_union is a bank	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
kqed_tv is a company that has an office in the city san_francisco	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
toyota is a specific automobile maker dealer in virginia	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
istanbul_atat_rk is a generalization of temple_of_the_reclining_buddha	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
wvla is a TV affiliate of the network nbc_news	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
ryan and joe_flacco_three_times are teammates	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0