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
comment_about is software used by machine-learning scientists	1112	24-jul-2018	99.3
vinyl_benzene is a chemical	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
www_yasumicon is a convention	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
early_county is an airport	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
esc_nro__815_pedro_juan_caballero is a South American person	1111	06-jul-2018	92.8
wpln is a radio station in the city nashville	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
ronald_reagan is a U.S. politician who holds the office of former_assistant_secretary	1115	03-sep-2018	99.2
tommy_amaker coaches the team harvard_radcliffe	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
hoosier_hill is a mountain in the state or province indiana	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
george_carlin is a person who died at the age of 71	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0