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
fresh_mint_leaves is a vegetable	1111	06-jul-2018	96.4
dana_krempels is a journalist	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
hope_mason is an African person	1111	06-jul-2018	90.9
midland_federal_savings_and_loan_association is a credit union	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n09_03_08 is a dataset used within the scientific field of machine learning	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
boris_yeltsin represents the region russia_federation	1113	15-aug-2018	99.8
japanese is spoken in the city tokyo	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
great_vow_zen_monastery is a place of worship that practices the religion of buddhism	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
north_carolina is a sate or province located in the country us	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
mark_l__mallory is the leader of the city cincinnati	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0