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
winter_cereal is a grain	1111	06-jul-2018	97.6
spokane_international_airport is a transportation port	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
n12_0 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ktjm is a radio station	1111	06-jul-2018	97.5
courier_standard_enterprise is a political blog	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
super_bowl_xliv_the_indianapolis_colts is a sports team that played in series	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
andrew_ross_sorkin is a journalist that writes for the publication new_york_times	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
percy_sledge is a musician in the genre soul	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
abubakar_abdurajak_janjalani belongs to the religion muslim	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
senegal is a country also known as china	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8