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
hair_straightner_cream is a personal care product	1111	06-jul-2018	97.2
union_of_right_forces_or_sps is a political party	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
unwittingness is a character trait	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
castillians is an ethnic group	1111	06-jul-2018	97.0
home_theatre_magazine is a magazine	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
pavement is a musician in the genre rock	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
alessandra_stanley is a journalist that writes for the publication new_york_times	1112	24-jul-2018	99.8
ba is a company also known as boeing	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
gordon_beckham plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
rachel is the parent of lt__joseph_r__hunt	1115	03-sep-2018	94.1