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
melvin_smith is an athlete	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
pierce_lake is a trail	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
thomas_scott is an architect	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
nickel_ is a building material	1111	06-jul-2018	98.5
grain_corn_bread is an agricultural product	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
iconic_characters is a generalization of james_dean	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
scandinavian_countries is a generalization of eastern_european_countries	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
bugs feeds on spider_mites	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
adam_loewen plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
nissan is a specific automobile maker dealer in japan	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0