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
extension_study is a research project	1111	06-jul-2018	99.4
line_health_insurance_premiums is a visualizable attribute	1111	06-jul-2018	90.4
sir_john_geilgud is a North American person	1111	06-jul-2018	91.5
kitchen_bench_tables is a kind of furniture	1111	06-jul-2018	99.5
n21_9 is a performance metric used by machine-learning scientists	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
baseball is a sport played in the venue miller_park	1112	24-jul-2018	100.0
woody_williams is an athlete that flied out to position center	1111	06-jul-2018	100.0
world_wrestling_entertainment has acquired wcw	1114	25-aug-2018	93.8
charles_babington is a journalist that writes for the publication washington	1113	15-aug-2018	93.8
black_pepper is an agricultural product that is usually cooked with butter	1114	25-aug-2018	100.0