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
hearty_soups is a food	1111	06-jul-2018	97.5
bed_smoking is a household item	1111	06-jul-2018	91.4
chuches_shoes is a kind of clothing	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ky_layer is a sports team position	1112	24-jul-2018	98.5
back_in_the_saddle_again is a song	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
yum_brands has acquired kfc	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
crabs is a type of crustaceans	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
edmonton is the capital city of the state or province alberta	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
kyle_mcclellan plays for the team cardinals_27_23	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
triangle has shape definition	1114	25-aug-2018	99.2