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
roger_johnson is an author in the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
contents_guide is a musical instrument	1111	06-jul-2018	95.2
xiphydriidae is a mollusk	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n3_779 is a dataset used within the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	91.7
nut_tree is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
ark contributed to the creative work commandments	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
moses has brother peter	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
ferguson is a person who graduated from the university college	1111	06-jul-2018	98.6
kim_il_sung is a person who died on the date n1994	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
mr__bush is a U.S. politician endorsed by the U.S. politician mccain	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9