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
irciniidae is a mollusk	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
forum_meeting is a perception action	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
fair_hills_farms is a farm	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
n02_28_2011 is a dataset used within the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ring_tones_ring is an item found on a table	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
ryan_anderson is an athlete who led magic	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
black_pepper is an agricultural product that is usually cooked with salt	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
filmmaking is an academic program at the university college	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8
paul001 graduated from college	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
national_museum is a museum in the city tokyo	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0