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
brown_dog_tick is an invertebrate	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
n10_50 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
government_administration_and_elections_committee is a political organization that is not part of the government	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
necessary_changes is a cognitive action	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
kuwait_finance_house is a bank	1111	06-jul-2018	94.0
institutional_review_board is an organization known by the acronym irb	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
burtonsville is a city located in the state or province maryland	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
leda is the mother of castor	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
yugoslav_federation is a country located in the geopolitical location countries	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
anthony_collins is an athlete who led chicago_bulls	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8