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
rodez_airport is a transportation system	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
small_tornado is a weather phenomenon	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
balfour_beatty_construction is a company	1111	06-jul-2018	92.0
power_prog_metal is a genre of music	1111	06-jul-2018	98.8
spanner_crab is a crustacean	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
agassi is an athlete who beat pete_sampras	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
ralph_friedgen coaches the team maryland	1116	12-sep-2018	99.9
new_york_daily_news is a newspaper in the city washington_d_c_	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
louse is called phylloxera	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
byrds is a musician in the genre folk	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0