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
rosehip_tea is a beverage	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
kickoff_game is a sports game	1111	06-jul-2018	99.8
tour_d_angleterre is a sporting event	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
juan_van_der_hamen is a visual artist	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n14_39 is a term used by physicists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
football_players is a generalization of stephen_davis	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
hub_airports is a generalization of frankfurt_main	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
accra is the capital city of the country ghana	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
ryan and joe_flacco_three_times are teammates	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
fenway is the home venue for the sports team boston_red	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0