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
melvin_smith is an athlete	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
rain_conditions is a weather phenomenon	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
holdem_game_gambling is a non-sports, non-electronic game	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
elizabeth_d__mynatt is an author in the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
cankdeska_cikana_community_college_fort_totten is a train station	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
national is a bank in germany	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
tortoises refers to more than one tortoise	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
seville was born in pensacola	1116	12-sep-2018	94.9
spiders is called black_widows	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
rockefeller_chapel is related to university_of_chicago	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0