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
rights_advocacy is a socio-political term	1111	06-jul-2018	97.8
n09_30 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
free_cell_phone is an item found on a table	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
sunlight_mountain_resort is a place to ski	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
two_similar_triangles is a geometric shape	1111	06-jul-2018	93.2
lt__joseph_r__hunt is an athlete who injured his/her eyes	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
maryland_general is a hospital in the city baltimore	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
nissan terminated the employment of carlos_ghosn	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
arthropods is a type of ticks	1116	12-sep-2018	95.7
thomas_hardy contributed to the creative work tess_of_the_durbervilles	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8