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
n11_38_44 is a year	1111	06-jul-2018	92.2
lowell_sun is a location	1115	03-sep-2018	99.4
joya_winery is a winery	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
ralph_snyder is a writer	1111	06-jul-2018	91.6
buffalo_campground is a place to ski	1111	06-jul-2018	92.5
the sports leage mlb uses the venue sbc_center	1114	25-aug-2018	96.9
american_academy is a museum in the city new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
ricky_williams is an athlete who wins heisman_trophy	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
spiders is an arthropod as well as black_widow also is	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cells is a subpart of the body within human_cord_blood	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9