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
pint_glass is an item found in the kitchen	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
legal_momentum is a political organization that is not part of the government	1111	06-jul-2018	92.7
funny_picture is form of visual art	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
steve_jensen is an Australian person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
number_145 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
snails is an animal that preys on animals	1113	15-aug-2018	99.1
easyjet is a company that has an office in the city liverpool	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
cattle is an animal that is a kind of larger_animals	1112	24-jul-2018	97.0
language_spanish is the language of the country costa_rica	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
golf is a sport with fans in the country uk_	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9