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
laura_bennett is a European person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
pinnacle_arkansas is a beach	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
batting_gloves is sports equipment	1111	06-jul-2018	97.6
mountain_walking is a sport	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
michael_crusoe coaches a sports team	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
lenny_moore plays the athletic team position running_back	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
madison_square_garden is the home venue for the sports team rangers	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
cavaliers is a sports team that plays against raptors	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
greene_street is a street in the city augusta	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
david001 is a journalist that writes for the publication nyt_	1112	24-jul-2018	99.2