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
online_net is a visualizable attribute	1111	06-jul-2018	90.9
trading_investments is an economic sector	1111	06-jul-2018	93.2
hotel_einhorn is a tourist attraction	1111	06-jul-2018	94.5
brion_james is a Canadian person	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n350_babies is an animal	1111	06-jul-2018	92.3
caspofungin is a drug worked on by merck	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
dodge is a specific automobile maker dealer in missouri	1115	03-sep-2018	93.8
abraham_s is the father of isaac	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
tim_stauffer plays the sport baseball	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
chrissie_hynde is a musician who is part of pretenders	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0