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
documents_comments is software used by machine-learning scientists	1112	24-jul-2018	98.8
lancia_aurelia_b24_spider is a kind of vehicle	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
toronto_environmental_film_and_video_festival is a film festival	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
search_advertising is a cognitive action	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
em_poker_chip is a sporting event	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
tomato is related to china	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jack_nicklaus_and_pete_dye is an athlete who beat gary_player	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
austin_museum_of_art is a museum in the city austin	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
davis_guggenheim directed the movie inconvenient_truth	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
acura is a specific automobile maker dealer in canada	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0