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
lodge_at_big_falls is a hotel	1111	06-jul-2018	94.5
newquay_town_centre is a skyscraper	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
line_expatriate_health_insurance is an economic sector	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
jason_bittner is a musician	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
number_114 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
lyndon_johnson represents the region us	1115	03-sep-2018	96.9
scorpions is an animal that is a kind of spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
nissan is a specific automobile maker dealer in texas	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
management is related to education	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
artillery is a type of weapon produced in israel	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0