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
sofa_sleeping is a household item	1111	06-jul-2018	91.8
best_home_office_furniture is a kind of furniture	1111	06-jul-2018	99.3
los_disparos is a currency	1111	06-jul-2018	99.9
way_mold is a fungus	1111	06-jul-2018	96.2
inguial_lymph_nodes is a lymph node	1111	06-jul-2018	98.9
service is headquartered in the country u_s_	1116	12-sep-2018	100.0
alan_ball held the position of captain	1115	03-sep-2018	100.0
chevrolet is a specific automobile maker dealer in missouri	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0
charlie_frye is an athlete who led cleveland_browns	1116	12-sep-2018	99.2
little_gas is a generalization of nuclear_missile	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0