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
torry_holt is an athlete	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
caldy_road is a street	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jerome_morrow is a chef	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
john_kempthorne is a musician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
gift_baskets_gift_baskets is sports equipment	1111	06-jul-2018	90.6
terrell_owens plays the athletic team position wide_receiver	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
cells is a subpart of the body within human_bone_marrow	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
spiders is an arthropod that looks like ants	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
atwell_hall is a building belonging to osu	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
novak_djokovic is an athlete who wins us_open	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9