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
n30_40 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
boletus_mushrooms is a fungus	1111	06-jul-2018	90.6
elizabeth_bogush is an actor	1111	06-jul-2018	95.8
hans_christian_andersen is a musician	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
service_e_mail is a visualizable object	1111	06-jul-2018	98.9
yugoslav_federation is a country also known as republic	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
matthew is a person who moved to the state california	1113	15-aug-2018	98.4
jerusalem is a city also known as ashdod	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
eggs is an agricultural product coming from beasts	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
the country namibia uses the currency dollar	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0