Read the Web :: Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

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.

instance	iteration	date learned	confidence
juan_encarnacion is an athlete	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
recurrence_engineering is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
wedding_breakfast is a type of meat	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
brighter_lighting is a perception event	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
hot_fudge is a kind of candy	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2

pests is called spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
n7 is the number of people that died in the event n1995_fox_river_grove_bus_train_collision	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
easyjet is a company that has an office in the city central_london	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
mike_mularkey works for jacksonville_jaguars	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
martha_stewart is a company headquartered in the city new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	99.5

Read the Web
Research Project at Carnegie Mellon University

NELL: Never-Ending Language Learning

Recently-Learned Facts