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
taliban_islamists is a terrorist organization	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
diamond_silver is a visualizable attribute	1111	06-jul-2018	92.9
n1990_school_election is an election	1111	06-jul-2018	95.7
lobelia_tea is a beverage	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
michael_a_erdmann is an author in the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
service is headquartered in the country u_s_	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
dept is a synonym for administration	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
jackson_quezada plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
spiders is an arthropod that looks like insects	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
mattel has acquired learning_company	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0