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
protection_engineering is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
la_massana is a visualizable scene	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
may_67 is a date	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
university_comments is software used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
n8_8_percentage_points is a machine-learning algorithm	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
n30_35_minutes has color brown	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
pacific_ocean is a lake in the state or province alaska	1116	12-sep-2018	99.0
lynn is a person who moved to the state california	1115	03-sep-2018	99.8
bush_administration has been charged with war_crimes	1115	03-sep-2018	99.2
o_hare_intl is a generalization of temple_of_the_reclining_buddha	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0