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
mask_software is a tool	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
nick_blasi is a male	1111	06-jul-2018	90.4
bare_tailed_armored_tree_rat is a mammal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
new_slovenia_or_nsi is a political party	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
bread_recipe_engineering is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
jeff_porcaro is a musician who is part of toto	1113	15-aug-2018	99.8
elephants is an animal that preys on larger_animals	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
john_steinbeck wrote the book east_of_eden	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
motorola is a company also known as samsung	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
istanbul_port is a generalization of temple_of_the_reclining_buddha	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0