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
n1985_study is a research project	1111	06-jul-2018	97.8
isobel_griffiths is a chef	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
premier_bird is an animal	1111	06-jul-2018	95.9
chicken_breast_fillets is a type of meat	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
british_clock is an item found on a wall	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
states is a state or province located in the geopolitical location foreign_countries	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
snowboarding is a sport taught in the country __america	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
hockey is a sport played in the venue xcel_energy_center	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
jeffrey_zaslow is a person who was written about in wall_street_journal	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
wjz is a radio station in the city new_york	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0