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
juice_cereal is a food	1111	06-jul-2018	97.8
jennifer_mccurdy is a professor	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
william_benton is an architect	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
phillipsburg_new_jersey is an island	1111	06-jul-2018	96.5
senior_human_resources_consultant is a kind of office held by a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
northwestern_memorial is a hospital in the city chicago_south	1116	12-sep-2018	98.1
chicken is an animal that eats cranberry_sauce	1115	03-sep-2018	96.9
aksu is a city located in the geopolitical location china	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
steelers hired bill_cowher	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
football_players is a generalization of drew_bledsoe	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0