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
wall_clock___clock is an item found on a wall	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
leblanc_caroline_gtr is a kind of vehicle	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
agency_report is a physical characteristic	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jose_alvarez coaches a sports team	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
spherical_shells is a weapon	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
spiders is an arthropod as well as bugs also is	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
dwayne_bowe and tony_gonzalez are teammates	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
department is an organization also known as service	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
baseball_players is a generalization of carlos_santana	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
oscar is a person who graduated from the university college	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6