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
underarmour_com is a retail store	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
n0_08 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
cio_today_magazine is a magazine	1111	06-jul-2018	99.7
ms___jacobson is a person	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
oregon_secretary is a kind of office held by a politician	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
new_orleans is the home city of the sports team new_orleans_hornets	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
zocor is a drug worked on by merck	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
edward_johnson is a politician who holds the office of senator	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
boris_johnson is a person who has residence in the geopolitical location central_london	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
tampa_bay_devil_rays is a sports team that plays against pittsburgh_pirates	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4