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
giant_wooden_door is an item often found in a hallway	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
n12_22 is a dataset used within the scientific field of machine learning	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
mr___bryan is a person	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
em_games is a product	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
legal_momentum is a political organization that is not part of the government	1111	06-jul-2018	92.7
newschannel5 is a TV station in the city nashville	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
edgar_froese is a musician who plays the guitar	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
the coach travis_moen won the trophy or tournament stanley_cup	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
boston is the home city of the sports team oakland_a_s	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
reggie_bush and brees are teammates	1112	24-jul-2018	99.6