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
first_medal is a film festival	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
the_international_sexy_ladies_show is a TV show	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
outside_magazine is a newspaper	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cover_engineering is an area of study within the field of machine learning	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
anne_perry is a European person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
indinavir is a drug worked on by merck	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
moises_alou is the parent of felipe_alou	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
pants is a clothing item to go with cloak	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
dwight_howard is an athlete who led magic	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
varitek and jarrod_saltalamacchia are teammates	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8