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
anchorage_bar_association is a professional organization	1111	06-jul-2018	91.2
global_anglican_church is a place of worship	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
livan_hernandez is an athlete	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
fun_father is a visualizable object	1111	06-jul-2018	99.0
canadian_musician_magazine is a newspaper	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
alfaromeo is a specific automobile maker dealer in _uk	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
phylloxera is called louse	1113	15-aug-2018	100.0
lynn is a person who moved to the state california	1115	03-sep-2018	99.8
head a muscle located in bodypart arms	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
football_players is a generalization of quarterback_brett_favre	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0