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
poker_pokercardgame is a board game	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
charcot_marie_tooth_disease_type_4b1 is a physiological condition	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
strawberrys is a visualizable thing	1111	06-jul-2018	95.5
kessler_s_thrush is a bird	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
flocking is a physical action	1111	06-jul-2018	95.8
vice_president_biden and michelle_obama are family members	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
florida_state_university is related to festival_of_new_music	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
seneca_college is a sports team that plays in the league international	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
national is a company that has an office in the country romania	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
steven_spielberg directed the movie amistad	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0