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
dipping_sauce is an item found in the kitchen	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
poker_newcastle is a cardgame	1111	06-jul-2018	90.6
rhinoceros_ratsnake is a reptile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
john_wynn is a U.S. politician	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
dave_wallace is a Mexican person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
justin_hayward is a musician who is part of moody_blues	1114	25-aug-2018	99.2
augusta is the capital city of the state or province ga	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
charles_krauthammer is a journalist that writes for the publication washington	1113	15-aug-2018	99.2
baseball is a sport played in the venue invesco_field_at_mile_high	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
bush is a person who was written about in new_york_times	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0