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
contact_the_center_director is a visualizable object	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
tracy_garrett is a professor	1111	06-jul-2018	91.3
ewingsdale_road is a highway	1111	06-jul-2018	93.6
banking_offshore_banking is an economic sector	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
inventory_table is an item found on the floor	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
shellfish feeds on crabs	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
baseball is a sport played in the venue great_american_ball_park	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
paul_mccartney is a musician who is part of the_beatles	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
xml_feed_tweet_seattle_mariners is an organization also known as tigers	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
spiders is called scorpions	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0