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
family_skiing is a sport	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
bush_trees is a plant	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
niki_museum is a museum	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jimmy_choo_shoes is a kind of clothing	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
jingzhou_yangtze_river_bridge is a bridge	1111	06-jul-2018	97.7
kick is a person who has residence in the geopolitical location new_south_wales	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
terrell_owens plays the athletic team position wide_receiver	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
states is a state or province located in the geopolitical location community	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
baseball_players is a generalization of carlos_santana	1116	12-sep-2018	98.4
chevrolet is a specific automobile maker dealer in maine	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0