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
state_trustee is a profession	1111	06-jul-2018	97.9
jeremy_allen is a chef	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
environment_committee is a professional organization	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
prayer_shawls is a kind of clothing	1111	06-jul-2018	92.1
university_comments is software used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	99.6
steve_spurrier is a person who belongs to the organization usc	1111	06-jul-2018	93.8
black_tea is an agricultural product produced in china	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
paul001 has wife karen001	1116	12-sep-2018	96.9
the sport baseball was played at n1965_world_series	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
staples_center is the home venue for the sports team kings	1116	12-sep-2018	99.6