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
finished_with_the_dogs is a musical album	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
newhall_street is a street	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
brown_crab is a crustacean	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
terrorist_activity_financing_offence ia a crime or charge	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
hot_springs_jazzfest is a music festival	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
washington is a state that is bordered by the state wyoming	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
black_widow is a synonym for spiders	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jeremy_shockey plays for the team eventual_super_bowl_champion_new_york_giants	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
football_players is a generalization of ben_roethlisberger	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
three is the number of people injured in the event blast_hits_bangkok	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0