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
far_out_recordings is a record label	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
unassembled_furniture is a kind of furniture	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
moon_so_ri is a male	1111	06-jul-2018	90.2
sliced_steak is a type of meat	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
strastrom_pond is a lake	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
tyler_colvin is an athlete who led chicago_cubs	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
wes_borland is a musician who plays the guitar	1112	24-jul-2018	96.9
cells is a subpart of the body within adult_bone_marrow	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
tigers is an organization also known as xml_feed_tweet_seattle_mariners	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
wwti is a TV affiliate of the network abc_news	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4