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
michael_a_erdmann is an author in the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
university_of_indianapolis is a university	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
judge_diana_e__murphy is a judge	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
yalden_s_desmomys is a mammal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
chocolate_hills is a mountain range	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
david_brooks is a journalist that writes for the publication times	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
indians is an organization also known as xml_feed_tweet_seattle_mariners	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
toronto_pearson is an airport in the city toronto	1116	12-sep-2018	99.5
the coach travis_moen won the trophy or tournament stanley_cup	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
falcons is a sports team that plays the sport football	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0