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
street_fighter_ii___special_champion_edition is a video game	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
nci_funded_study is a research project	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
n1992_barcelona_olympic_games is an instance of the olympics	1111	06-jul-2018	95.1
inachidae is an arthropod	1111	06-jul-2018	96.5
national_association_of_black_social_workers is a non-profit organization	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
cursive is a musician in the genre indie	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
tv_actors is a generalization of lisa_kudrow	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
emi terminated the employment of lyor_cohen	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
tokyo is a city that lies on the river grand	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
chad_hurley is a person who belongs to the organization youtube	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0