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
university_comments is software used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
larry_s_markets is a retail store	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
thrillville__off_the_rails is a video game	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
networks_associates_inc is a biotech company	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
basketball_the_nba is a sports league	1115	03-sep-2018	93.2
honolulu is the capital city of the state or province hawaii	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
large_herds refers to more than one animals	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
recluse_spiders is called spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
large_herds is a generalization of elephants	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
rodin is a visual artist in the field of drawings	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8