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
battle_of_ayshal is a military conflict	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
shelf_desk_clock is an item found on a wall	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
destin_airport is a transportation system	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
crystal_beach_hotel is a place to ski	1111	06-jul-2018	94.1
physics_students is a victim	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
spiders is an arthropod as well as black_widow also is	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
sarah_palin is the leader of the city wasilla	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
jeremy_shockey plays for the team eventual_super_bowl_champion_new_york_giants	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
hbos terminated the employment of james_crosby	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
john_ford directed the movie the_searchers	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8