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
the_barbirolli_string_quartet is a musical artist	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
prescription_bread is a muscle	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
philip_h__abelson is a scientist	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
colli_di_scandiano is a wine	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
former_kelowna_rockets is a weapon	1111	06-jul-2018	98.0
russian is a language used in the university ohio_state_university	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
microsoft is related to xbox	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
fred_taylor plays the athletic team position running_back	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
hayes is a U.S. politician who holds the office of secretary	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
central_london is the capital city of the country britain	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0