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
radiological_study is a research project	1111	06-jul-2018	97.8
margaret_wente is a person	1111	06-jul-2018	94.1
adidas_climacool_shoes is a kind of clothing	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
deepwater_squirrelfish is an invertebrate	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
anthony_pace is a Canadian person	1111	06-jul-2018	90.1
iconic_characters is a generalization of james_dean	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
chisos is a mountain in the state or province texas	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
white_mountain_peak is related to north_america	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
kennedy_space_center is headquartered in the state or province florida	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
je_sus and lord are family members	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8