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
iclx is a conference	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
lognes is a visualizable scene	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
st_john_river is a river	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n3_2_victory is an event outcome	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
python_2_7 is a programming language	1111	06-jul-2018	95.3
expensive_camerais part of lens	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
football_players is a generalization of favre	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
jobs is a person who moved to the state arizona	1115	03-sep-2018	99.8
yovani_gallardo is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
spiders is an animal that preys on animals	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0