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
number_54342 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
boonville is a city	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
arnold_afb is an airport	1111	06-jul-2018	95.2
serotonin_noradrenaline_dopamine is a chemical	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
surface_leaves is a vegetable	1111	06-jul-2018	91.9
english is a language used in the university british_council	1113	15-aug-2018	96.9
keira_knightly has spouse victoria	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
kennekuk died in the state or province kansas	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
spinal_cord is a subpart of the body within system	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
boston_herald is a newspaper in the city boston	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4