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
dairy_cream is an agricultural product	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
rock___pop is a genre of music	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
warming_cult is a physical action	1111	06-jul-2018	93.0
ms_project is a research project	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
contracts_food is a food	1111	06-jul-2018	98.1
venus_williams is an athlete who beat serena_williams	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
baseball is a sport played in the venue louisiana_superdome	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
Eating breast decreases the risk of malignancies	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
european_nations is a generalization of poland	1115	03-sep-2018	96.9
hotel_victoria is a hotel in the city toronto	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0