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
national_landmark is a monument	1111	06-jul-2018	90.7
center_sensors is a sports team position	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
european_committee is a political organization that is not part of the government	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
the_super_smashers is a musical artist	1111	06-jul-2018	96.0
psp_windows_media_player_video is a consumer electronic device	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
oil is an agricultural product growing in washington	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
congressional_elections happened on the date n2010	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
black_widow is called spider	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
jerome_robbins belongs to the ethnic group russian_jewish	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
wachovia_center is the home venue for the sports team philadelphia_76ers	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0