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
miscellaneous_magazines is a kind of media	1111	06-jul-2018	99.1
james_neal is a European person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
election_window is an item found on a wall	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
cherokee_darter is a fish	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
robert_mcarthur is a writer	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
n400_employees is a synonym for board	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
cookies can be served with giant_chocolate	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
honda_center is the home venue for the sports team oregon_ducks_basketball	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
north participated in the event series	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
football_players is a generalization of donovan_mcnabb	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0