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
n2_26_pm_1_comments is a dataset used within the scientific field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	95.6
mayor_james_hahn is a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
one_piece_swimsuit is a kind of clothing	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
saint_ambrose_university is a sports team	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
mount_lokon is a mountain range	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
pacific_coliseum is a tourist attraction in the city hamilton	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
george_w is a U.S. politician who is a member of the political group house	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
selene is the mother of ersa	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
shells is a type of weapon produced in israel	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
baseball is a sport played in the venue wrigley_field	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0