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
links_files is a criminal	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
spotted_turbot is a fish	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
hb_1634 is a drug	1111	06-jul-2018	93.3
n1945___1973 is a year	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
center_power is a sports team position	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
oregon_ducks is a sports team that played in finals	1113	15-aug-2018	99.8
michael_peterson has been charged with first_degree_murder	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
kpfk is a radio station in the city los_angeles_ca	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
shakira is a musician in the genre pop	1112	24-jul-2018	91.5
robot_futures occurrs in the building gates_and_hillman_centers	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0