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
adverse_bearing is an event outcome	1111	06-jul-2018	90.8
delightful_sitting_room is a kind of room	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
harvey_chichester is a journalist	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
center_purchases is a sports team position	1111	06-jul-2018	98.9
two_vintage is a parlour game	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
nutrition is an academic field useful for the job position registered_dietitian	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9
arizona_daily_star is a newspaper in the city tucson	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
dragonflies is a type of insects	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
israel is the attacker in the event israel_bombs_syria_army_targets_after_golan_attack	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
john_irving is related to john_irving	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0