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
sudden_unexpected_loss is an event outcome	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
n2016_olympic is an instance of the olympics	1111	06-jul-2018	97.8
click_business_model is a physical action	1112	24-jul-2018	94.1
charles_cornelius is a scientist	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
crazy_waves is a weather phenomenon	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
cooper is a person who graduated from the university college	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
cost is an agricultural product that is usually cut into percent	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
sixers is a sports team that plays against raptors	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
wplg_tv is a TV affiliate of the network abc_news	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
republican is a person who has residence in the geopolitical location puerto_rico	1113	15-aug-2018	96.9