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
yellow_fronted_barbet is a bird	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ramon_troncoso is an athlete	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
individual_plant is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
food_workers is a trade union	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
class_teams is a machine-learning conference	1111	06-jul-2018	93.1
national is a bank that bought bank_of_punjab	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
jay_z and bey are family members	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
bill_parcells coaches in the league nfl	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
european_nations is a generalization of spain	1115	03-sep-2018	99.2
az_republic is a newspaper in the city downtown_phoenix	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8