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
crystal_bed is a kind of furniture	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
illness_record is a political blog	1111	06-jul-2018	98.8
voice_students is a victim	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n4_00 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
rashad_jeanty is an athlete	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
anfield is the home venue for the sports team liverpool_john_moores_university	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
the coach torry_holt won the trophy or tournament super_bowl_xlii	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
maitland is a city located in the state or province florida	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
kaiser_wilhelm has citizenship in the country germany	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
aksu is a city located in the geopolitical location china	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8