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
chris_meeks is an actor	1111	06-jul-2018	91.0
fitzgerald_museum is a museum	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
julius_l__stewart is an architect	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
surface_leaves is a vegetable	1111	06-jul-2018	91.9
calliodentallidae is a mollusk	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
anthony_smith plays the sport football	1116	12-sep-2018	90.7
chicken is an animal that eats goat_cheese	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
boston is the home city of the sports team oakland_a_s	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
agassi is an athlete who wins australian_open	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
cable looks like link	1112	24-jul-2018	98.4