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
shodokan_aikido is a sport	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
julie_hewitt is a professor	1111	06-jul-2018	91.1
sausage_casserole is a type of meat	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
home_equity_loans is a shopping mall	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
day_the_meeting is a perception action	1111	06-jul-2018	93.9
manuel_g_ttsching is a musician who is part of ash_ra_tempel	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
lewis wrote the book mere_christianity	1113	15-aug-2018	96.9
waec is a radio station in the city atlanta	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8
slavic is a language used in the university columbia_university	1116	12-sep-2018	99.8
tampa is the location of the event crash_that_killed_5_men_on_i_275_still_under_investigation	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0