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
candybars is a kind of candy	1111	06-jul-2018	97.7
u_s__army_military_police is a political organization that is not part of the government	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
carpet_face is a household item	1111	06-jul-2018	90.3
furniture_moulds is a fungus	1111	06-jul-2018	90.5
folk_trip_pop is a genre of music	1111	06-jul-2018	98.6
venus_williams is an athlete who beat martina_hingis	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
unknown is the guilty in the event n2006_huntsville__alabama_bus_accident	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
the coach torry_holt won the trophy or tournament super_bowl	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
matthew_l__wald works for times	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9
the companies photobucket and youtube compete with eachother	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8