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
watts_winery is a winery	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
poker_standings is a sports game	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
rights_theory is a political issue	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
comment_about is software used by machine-learning scientists	1112	24-jul-2018	99.3
greenish_black_mold is a fungus	1112	24-jul-2018	92.3
heals is a clothing item to go with jeans	1111	06-jul-2018	98.4
english_language is a language taught in language schools in the city san_francisco	1112	24-jul-2018	92.9
shortstop is an athlete who injured his/her back	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
j_p__ricciardi is a person also known as p_j__brown	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
bed is often found in bedroom_studio	1111	06-jul-2018	96.9