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
childhood_practice is an academic field	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
alcohol_induced_hypertension is a disease	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
kuwg is a radio station	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
jinlong_wang is an author in the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
blue_handed_hermit_crab is a crustacean	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
akron hired j_d__brookhart	1112	24-jul-2018	96.7
michael_irvin plays the athletic team position wide_receiver	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
morgan_freeman starred in the movie the_shawshank_redemption	1115	03-sep-2018	98.4
lindsay_davenport is an athlete who beat martina_hingis	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
n185 is the number of people that died in the event n2011_christchurch_earthquake	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0