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
half_water is a beverage	1111	06-jul-2018	92.5
aaa_magazine is a magazine	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
certified_senior_professional is a job position	1111	06-jul-2018	95.2
robert_moon is an astronaut	1111	06-jul-2018	98.8
survey_students is a victim	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
lou_gerstner is a top member of ibm	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
albert_pujols is an athlete coached by tony_fernandez	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
states is a subpart of southeast	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
christian held the position of lord	1112	24-jul-2018	99.2
sugar can cause blood_sugar	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0