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
michael_barrett is a Mexican person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
northern_hawk_cuckoo is a bird	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
michael_franks is a chef	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
n30_40 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
chilean_national_zoo is an aquarium	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jim_zorn coaches in the league nfl	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
sweats is a clothing item to go with shoes	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
paul001 and jesus_christ are siblings	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
willie_parker and ben_roethlisberger are teammates	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
the home stadium of jamal_mayers is wrigley_field	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0