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
diapriidae is a mollusk	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
associate_justice_william_rehnquist is a judge	1111	06-jul-2018	98.8
yesterday_s_elections is an election	1111	06-jul-2018	96.1
iron_cast_steel_decoration is a building material	1111	06-jul-2018	97.4
necessitating is a physical action	1111	06-jul-2018	90.8
us_dept is an organization also known as administration	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
sun is a newspaper in the city new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	92.9
chicken is an animal that eats adobo	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9
kirk_franklin is a musician in the genre gospel	1113	15-aug-2018	99.9
roof is a building feature made from the building material steel	1115	03-sep-2018	92.7