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
supplements_comments is software used by machine-learning scientists	1112	24-jul-2018	99.3
harrison_road is a street	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
friedrich_wilhelm_nietzche is a scientist	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
sulcus_of_lesser_petrosal_nerve is a nerve	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
kirby_bellars_priory is a place of worship	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
walb is a TV affiliate of the network nbc_news	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
n28 is the number of people injured in the event blasts_injure_28_protesters_in_bangkok	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
canadian_islamic_congress is an organization known by the acronym cic	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
jackson_diehl is a journalist that writes for the publication washington	1113	15-aug-2018	96.9
chad_hurley works for youtube	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0