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
larger_diesel is a refinery product	1112	24-jul-2018	91.4
assessment_capacity is a character trait	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
n2_8 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jane_harrison is a professor	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
children_books is a kind of media	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
argentina is a country also known as china	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
alfred_p__sloan is a top member of gm	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
english is the language of the country holland	1116	12-sep-2018	91.8
dreamworks terminated the employment of jeffrey_katzenberg	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
david_climer works for tennessean	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8