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
major_rice is a grain	1112	24-jul-2018	94.6
whole_bottle is a visualizable object	1111	06-jul-2018	98.7
semi_gloss_photo_paper is an office supply	1111	06-jul-2018	93.7
john_paxton is a visual artist	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
colossians_2_13_14 is an ethnic group	1111	06-jul-2018	95.5
baseball is a sport played in the venue chase_field	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
lima is the capital city of the country peru	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
end is an event at the location new_south_wales	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
bird_watching is a sport with fans in the country __america	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
brandon_phillips is an athlete who led reds	1116	12-sep-2018	93.8