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
em_poker_copyright_information is a sporting event	1111	06-jul-2018	93.0
discovery_girls is a publication	1111	06-jul-2018	91.7
john_phipps is a journalist	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jock_mahoney is a North American person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
robert_percival is a scientist	1111	06-jul-2018	91.4
the home stadium of moises_alou is wrigley_field	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
beans is an agricultural product produced in __america	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
countrywide is a bank that has angelo_r__mozilo as its CEO	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
cyrenius is a person who has residence in the geopolitical location syria	1113	15-aug-2018	99.6
shawl_collar is a clothing item to go with jacket	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8