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
investment_students is an economic sector	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
recipe_book_collection is a recipe	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
golf_course_engineering is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
n12344 is a ZIP code	1112	24-jul-2018	99.8
cross_section_data is a scientific term	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cat is an animal that is a kind of feline_friends	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
theodore_roosevelt represents the region us	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8
mauldin_auditorium is a room in the building newell_simon_hall	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
new_yorker_magazine is headquartered in the city nueva_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
amazon_com_logo is a company also known as amazon_com	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8