Read the Web :: Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

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.

instance	iteration	date learned	confidence
lorazepam_lorazepam is an archaeon	1111	06-jul-2018	93.9
sweat_potatoes is an agricultural product	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
luis_valbuena is a Mexican person	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
keeled_ratsnake is a reptile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
_metal is a genre of music	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1

edward_johnson is a politician who holds the office of vice_president	1114	25-aug-2018	99.8
air_canada_center is a tourist attraction in the city toronto	1116	12-sep-2018	99.0
black_pepper is an agricultural product that is usually cooked with mustard	1114	25-aug-2018	99.9
museum_of_modern_art is a museum in the city new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
oxford is a city that lies on the river cherwell	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8

Read the Web
Research Project at Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

Recently-Learned Facts