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
albert_of_mainz is a monarch	1111	06-jul-2018	98.8
under_the_banner_of_heaven is a book	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
north_dakota_state_university is a sports team	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cynthia_cole is a professor	1111	06-jul-2018	90.9
honeylocust_pod_gall_midge is an invertebrate	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cable looks like computer	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
hockey is a sport played in the venue mts_centre	1112	24-jul-2018	99.8
dexter_filkins is a journalist that writes for the publication new_york_times	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
stoops is related to english	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
chad_hurley works for youtube	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0