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
n49_7 is a machine-learning algorithm	1111	06-jul-2018	99.2
sawyer_county_record is a newspaper	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
hiroshima_castle is a place of worship	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
folk_thrash_metal is a genre of music	1111	06-jul-2018	98.9
em_poker_pot is a board game	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
nady and gardner are teammates	1112	24-jul-2018	93.8
sergio_romo is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
the coach jason_campbell won the trophy or tournament super_bowl	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
english is a language used in the university new_york_university__s_steinhardt_school	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
the sports leage mlb uses the venue comerica	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0